


All the Dead Are Here

by Footloose



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Horror, M/M, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-29
Updated: 2012-10-29
Packaged: 2017-11-17 08:02:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 46,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/549359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Footloose/pseuds/Footloose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's not much outside Arthur's purview -- eventually, all creatures fall to the Reaper's scythe.  It's never personal.  It's just his job.</p><p>That was true until Arthur ran into the only death he's ever regretted reaping -- Merlin, who is inexplicably alive and well.</p><p>But that's not all.  There are monsters that exist outside of life and death, and they're spreading like vermin in the city of London.  The balance is in jeopardy, and Merlin may be the only one who can help him restore order in the chaos.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All the Dead Are Here

**Author's Note:**

> This is fic is written in the horror genre. There are:
> 
> Horror themes, death themes, major character death (temporary), blood, gore, gross stuff, decomposition, mutilation, violence, chaos, failure to obey the How To Survive A Horror Movie Rules, and, worst of all, Gwaine making a bad zombie joke.
> 
> You've been warned.
> 
> Edited to add (15-Dec-2012): [A gorgeous fanfic cover](http://fuckyeah.livejournal.com/277043.html#cutid1) has been made by the awesome fuckyeah!
> 
> * * *

 

* * *

 

****

 

**

**ooOOoo**

**

 

****

"It's not like I _want_ to. I... it's simply the way it works. Life is a gift, to be used or squandered however you mortals see fit."

Arthur was feeling particularly maudlin, which was ridiculous, because Reapers _didn't_ get maudlin, only vengeful and wrathful and power-hungry with an occasional side of merciful, and he was trying very hard not to examine why he was feeling maudlin in the first place.

On this particularly fine, foggy evening, Arthur was at a bar tucked tightly between a skeezy chip shop with dubious health inspection certificates and an alley that had seen everything from illicit hook-ups to _et tu, Brutus_ backstabbings that had been occurring like clockwork ever since the Romans invaded Britain. Despite the location and the shoddy brickwork and the blinking on-its-last-legs neon sign, The Bangers Club was actually quite nice inside.

Almost homey.

Arthur had paid for his beer with a twenty-pound note from someone else's wallet and nursed it within an inch of its life because the modern age had forgotten the tricks of ancient times, and the beer these days was _foul_. He didn't want to have to work his way through another pint while he got his misery off his chest.

There was a bloke sitting next to him. He had wide-eyed but glazed-over look that came from drinking too much and fighting to pay attention. Or maybe it was to stay awake? Arthur wasn't sure. He had black hair and a pouty mouth, but the shape of his face was wrong, his hair was a tightly coiled curl instead of a shaggy-soft ruffle, and those eyes were brown.

They should be blue.

No, Arthur was not maudlin for any particular reason. He took a tiny sip of his beer and tried to remember where he'd left off.

"Unfortunately, you forget that life is also a system of checks and balances. For example, if you do something good, it balances out with something bad, and vice versa. Think of it this way -- every life has a clock. It has a set amount of hours, and it counts backwards. When that time is up, the life ends. It's as simple as that --"

"You have a pretty mouth," the man blurted out suddenly.

"Oh. Thank you. That's a... strange thing to say, but thank you," Arthur said. He wasn't worried that the man was actually hearing what Arthur was _really_ saying -- that was part of the glamour. People saw what they wanted to see -- and heard what they wanted to hear -- as the moment of their deaths approached, and no one had seen him as a Reaper since, oh, the Black Plague? Shortly after that time, anyway. It was rare that anyone imagined him as the cowled skeleton with a sharpened scythe these days, but no one, no one had ever seen _him_ when he didn't want to be seen.

Except for --

Arthur squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose. Sixty-eight years since that man. Sixty-eight years, and Arthur couldn't forget him.

"I usually leave well enough alone," Arthur said, dropping his arm. "Some people live on borrowed time -- a few extra seconds, a few extra hours. It doesn't make much of a difference, not when a whole lot of people die sooner than they're supposed to, so it all balances out. But lately, people are taking _decades_ , and that really throws everything out of balance. That's when I have to step in."

If it were up to Arthur, he wouldn't intervene at all. Half the time, he didn't think he needed to get involved, because life really was full of checks and balances. The other half, though... mortals didn't appreciate Arthur's interference, but in the end, they couldn't escape him.

No one could. Not even...

Arthur swallowed the bitter taste in his mouth. He wished he could blame the bitterness on the beer. "People are born, they grow, they live, they die. That's the natural course. It's when it doesn't pass the way it's meant to pass and these people extend their lives that I have to put a stop to it."

Arthur sighed inwardly. He so rarely received credit these days. Two hundred years ago? The lack of recognition for his work as a Reaper grated on his nerves. Nowadays, Arthur shrugged it off and tried to be amused by the reasons that the mortal officials came up with to explain away the sudden deaths that couldn't be explained.

"So I do. Put a stop to it, I mean," Arthur said, staring down the dregs of his pint. He had a pang of nostalgia for good Egyptian beer -- they had known how to brew a good beer back in the time of the pharaohs. "It's never personal. Whether they're up for sainthood or a medal or valour or a death sentence, if it's time for them to go, then it's time for them to go."

Arthur had never been involved nor invested in anyone that he'd "helped along". At the most, he'd been vexed or annoyed when the hunt became ridiculously long or complicated, and maybe every now and then he experienced pleasure or delight when he finally attained a target.

But that had been before Merlin Emerson..

Arthur still wondered what Merlin had seen when he'd looked at Arthur's glamour. It was something that nagged at him ever since that night, especially when Arthur had said hello and Merlin had answered with, "It's real nice to meet you, _Arthur_."

Merlin had heard his name instead of the glamour he should have heard. Or maybe it had been a coincidence. Maybe Merlin's "Arthur" had been a brother or a cousin or a friend.

Or a lover, Arthur had realized later, 

"I bet you're really good with that mouth."

Arthur glanced at the man sitting beside him. In his misery, he'd almost forgotten that he had a job to do.

Thinking about Merlin did that to him, and that was why Arthur should _not_ be thinking about him.

"Yes, well." Arthur paused. He felt his brow wrinkle and tried to concentrate. He put down the last of his pint untouched, the glass clinking on the scuffed counter. "I've never really had the time to wonder how some people did it, you know. How they could make it so that they lived ten years, twenty years longer than they should. I've never had the time. My job's to put people down --"

Arthur trailed off. A flash of emotion made his voice thick, and he thought that was strange, but he was getting used to it. Every time that he thought about Merlin -- more frequently these days, it seemed -- every time he became bloody well _maudlin_ , his voice did funny things and his chest hurt. He idly wondered that, if he'd ever taken the time to figure out how mortals escaped him, that he could've taught the trick of it to Merlin, and Merlin could have lived just a little longer.

So that Arthur could have had _more_ with him.

The man next to him leaned close, his breath sour and bitter with a mixture of ale and prawn-flavoured crisps, and asked, "D'you want to suck my cock?" 

Arthur exhaled in irritation. No matter the era, some people had a way with words, while others simply _didn't_.

Merlin had had a way with words. 

His chest hurt again. It felt as if someone had reached through his ribs and crushed his heart. Arthur flinched inwardly -- a flinch that coincided with the sharp elbow from the drunk seated beside him.

"D'you. You know. D'you want to put that mouth to good use? My cock volunteers --"

Arthur forced a wan smile to his lips. He assumed that this man -- Joseph Thornbull, originally from Swindon, now residing at a quaint, somewhat run-down boarding house called Queen's Grill in London -- had seen more than the half-hearted smile Arthur forced through the glamour, because his face split into a shite-eating grin. Maybe when Thornbull looked at Arthur, he saw the remnant of the last woman he'd fucked, maybe a composite of the most beautiful women he'd ever had a crush on during his extended lifetime. 

The thought made him uncomfortable. He couldn't help remembering Merlin and how, for an instant, it had almost been as if Merlin had seen _him_.

Arthur studied Thornbull again. "Well, I've dragged this on long enough."

He wished that it didn't quite sound so much like _I've wallowed long enough_ to his own ears, and slipped off his stool. 

He did not wallow. He was a demi-God. He did not suffer misery -- he doled it out.

Thornbull was on Arthur's heels on the way out the door. "So? My place or yours?"

Arthur exhaled. He patted Thornbull's cheek and felt the familiar surge of _darkness_ pass through them, severing the man's life with a single touch. "Quite honestly? If I had a flat, I would not bring you there. And your sorry excuse for a loft? It does not appeal to me. It's not that I don't find you vile. I do. You're filthy and disgusting and you're the lowest of the low. You've been stealing other people's lives, and it's your own dumb luck that you happened to have stolen the lives of those who were close to dying, and it didn't come up on my radar early enough. On the other hand, though, you spared me a bit of work, because even those with terminal illnesses fight at the very end and refuse to let go. But a baby's life? Oh, no, I can't let that one pass."

Thornbull stared at him owlishly, his grin turning lewd. _Lewder_ , if that was possible.

Arthur didn't know how Thornbull viewed the glamour. He preferred not to know. Arthur could see the neurons firing in the man's alcohol-sodden brain, but he could equally see the life in him withering away.

"I've got a long 'un," Thornbull said, grabbing at his crotch and adjusting himself. "I'll shove it all the way down your throat and make you choke. I wanna see your mouth stretched around it, I wanna see you tear up when you try to breath around my fucking cock --"

"Seriously?" Arthur rubbed his face with his hands. Sometimes, trying to explain? It was a waste of breath. He didn't even know why he bothered.

Arthur checked his watch. Thornbull's life was fading before his eyes, and Thornbull had no idea. Arthur glanced around the bar and he supposed he _could_ be merciful this one time and not have the patrons traumatized.

He turned, patting Thornbull's shoulder. There was that flare of _darkness_ again at the contact, but there was no life to sever anymore. Instead, the power would thrum in Thornbull's body and keep him alive just long enough to get him out of the bar. Arthur reached for the bottle of whiskey that the bartender had left just under the bar, helped himself to a dirty shot glass, and poured Thornbull the very last drink he was ever going to have.

Thornbull grinned, his smile lopsided, and he drank it down in one go.

"Why don't we get out of here," Arthur suggested, and he knew that _this_ , Thornbull heard and understood, because it was what he'd been waiting to hear all along.

"Yeah, baby, I'm gonna _fuck your brains out and make you scream_ ," Thornbull said.

Arthur sucked a tooth and considered that, perhaps, he was being a little too magnanimous tonight.

Thornbull pulled his coat on and chased after the sleeve of his coat like a dog after its tail. Arthur calmly shrugged into his trench coat. While Thornbull forged out of the pub, dragging Arthur along, Arthur sighed heavily and counted down the seconds to getting this over with. He had a long list of people to get to before the night was out.

The night air was crisp and clear for a brief moment after stepping from the threshold, free from the stale smoke and body odour and the alcohol soak, but even that momentary gasp of freshness faded with the roil of diesel fuel and rotting algae and river water fog. It was dark; the nearest streetlight had burned out and cast a dark gap along the line of run-down buildings and shops with crooked _Closed_ signs and alleys just as shady as the one next to the bar.

A car drove past. Its headlights barely cut through the fog. The rumble of the engine and the rolling tumble of rubber tyres over gravelly asphalt faded, muted by distance and mist. A distant screech and the flashing lights of police sirens added a creak of sound and a brief wink of colour in the gloom before the mist swallowed it up.

The location and the moment was as private as Arthur could make it, and more than what a bastard like Thornbull deserved.

"Darling," Arthur said in bored monotone, dropping the glamour only a tiny bit. He was merely following a script that he'd perfected ages ago. He had a million scripts for every situation, and they were all getting old, but sometimes simple worked best. "Why don't you get my car? It's the blue one, across the street there."

There was no car. He wasn't holding keys in his hand, either, but Thornbull saw what Arthur wanted him to see. Their fingers touched in brief contact -- human skin to Reaper's touch, and Thornbull would have seen Arthur as he really was if he hadn't turned away to dart across the road.

Arthur was already walking away, and he made it to the crosswalk when he heard a dull thump that came a second after he _felt_ Thornbull die. It was in that moment that something unsettled within him finally faded and disappeared.

The balance had been righted.

Arthur nodded to himself. He turned the corner and concentrated; he had a number of other delinquents to accost that evening, and the sooner that he finished the work he'd laid out for himself that evening, the sooner he could rest.

Even demi-Gods needed sleep sometimes.

He could sense the stolen life scattered throughout the city easily enough. It tasted to him of something foul and twisted, torn from its rightful path. He needed only follow the sensation until it was so strong that he could smell the taint on the thief. He took a deep breath and started _walking_ \-- it was so easy to get from one place to another in a single step if he had a direction to follow -- when he had a feeling of something _wrong_.

Arthur stumbled to a stop.

He tilted his head, closed his eyes, and tried to put a name to the... thing.

It wasn't the sullied twist of stolen life. Nothing at all in comparison to stench of someone who had lived for decades on borrowed time. It was... cloying, like bad perfume lingering in a room hours after the wearer had departed.

It was the decay that set into a wound of a dying man, the panic of an animal gnawing its leg off to escape a trap, a clawing hunger that would force a creature to eat anything and everything to survive.

Arthur walked around the corner, turning his head from side to side, trying to see through the fog. He reached the street not far from The Banger's Club and came to a startled stop.

Thornbull was no longer face-down on the asphalt, dead to this world, his body a crumpled mess of departed soul and balance restored. He was laying on his back, his eyes open, his frame jerking now and again in a stuttering pattern. His mouth had fallen open, as if in his death he would scream.

And he should scream.

There was _something_ crouched over him, gangly limbs steadying the body, a round head dipping down and shaking from side to side like a dog wrestling with a toy. Finally, triumphant, with the squelching sound of skin and muscle and bone _tearing_ , the figure sat back on its haunches, grasping what looked to be Thornbull's left shoulder and most of his upper chest in its clawed hands.

It ate.

Noisily, with lip-smacking, spluttering sounds, chewing, chewing, _chewing_ , open mouthed and uncivilized, making a purring sound deep in its chest of delight and pleasure and ravenous satisfaction. Blood splattered on asphalt like rain.

Arthur stood there, dumbstruck.

This was wrong. It was _so_ wrong.

Arthur might be a Reaper; he might have chosen to take up his father's mantle to assist in ensuring the balance of life and death on the planet; he might sometimes be cruel and he might sometimes be kind, but never, never once, had he left a body to be desecrated like this.

He reached out for the creature, because any creature that walked the earth was still under his dominion, and --

There was nothing. Nothing tangible. The _feel_ of the creature's life was... wrong.

Very wrong.

As if sensing him, the creature paused in mid-bite and raised its bloody chin. It snuffled the air through a nose that was more porcine than human, and that was only because the skin and cartilage had rotted and sloughed off some time ago. Black, gleaming eyes scanned the road before they fell on Arthur.

For a brief moment, Arthur thought the creature would come after _him_. For a brief moment, Arthur, the Reaper, had a flash of what it was like to be _prey_. For a brief moment, Arthur, the demi-God who felt no emotions beyond frequent irritation, occasional vengeful wrath and dubious flickers of goodwill, felt something different.

It might even be fear.

The creature made a yelping sound and scrambled onto its haunches, onto its feet. Arthur saw now that it was wearing human clothes, though so dishevelled and torn and filthy that he was hard-pressed to see the point where fabric ended and skin began. It opened its mouth and exhaled in what was possibly meant to be a roar of outrage, but what came out instead was a high-pitched, wheezing sound.

It turned and disappeared into the fog in a lurching half-run.

It took most of Thornbull with it.

 

****

 

**

**ooOOoo**

**

 

****

"You're pining," Will said, hitting Merlin's arm.

Merlin glanced sideways, shook his head, and continued checking off the inventory log for the ambulance supplies. "I am _counting_. We have twenty rolls of gauze and we should have thirty. We're low on oxygen. We should have more of --"

"You're pining," Will said again. He crossed his arms and leaned a shoulder against the wedge of the open ambulance door, raising his eyebrows in his usual _don't argue with me, you know I'm right_ expression of smug self-importance. "I know what pining looks like. You are the pinnacle of pining."

"I'm not pining."

"Mate, ever since I've known you, you've been pining. Maybe not all the time, because it's hard to pine when you've got your hands in someone's guts and you're trying to make sure that they don't spill all over the road where some numpty can drive over them, but you're pining."

Merlin ignored Will. He checked the expiration date on the saline bags and counted how many there were, rearranging them in reverse order so that the oldest would get used first. 

"You should… call him, whoever it is," Will said.

Merlin made a few notes on his clipboard and opened another drawer.

"Or I could call him. Just give me a name," Will said.

"Leave it alone," Merlin said, shifting to glare at his partner. 

"His number?"

"I don't have his number, all right?" Merlin admitted, gritting his teeth. Half-truths were wonderful things, and he'd become an expert in lying without lying over the years, but he really did wish that Will would drop the subject. It had been an awfully sore point with him for, oh, almost seventy years?

"You don't have his number. All right. I will give you that in the throes of ecstasy, you might have forgotten mundane details like getting his mobile. That can be fixed. What's his name?"

It took a while for Merlin to unclench his jaw to say, "I don't know his name."

Merlin knew his first name, but he'd long ago decided that it was a pseudonym. He'd met Arthur back in a time where men loving other men was simply _not done_ , never mind mentioned even in impolite company, and it was entirely possible that Arthur -- or whatever his name had been -- had only wanted a few hours to explore a sexual curiosity. Merlin tried very hard not to think about it, because it was hard to know someone else's motivations when he hadn't seen him in decades. In any case, it didn't matter, because these days, Arthur was either a very old, wrinkly man living in a countryside retirement home somewhere in France, shaking his cane at his unruly great grandchildren, or buried six feet under the surface in some decrepit graveyard.

The long silence from the rear of the ambulance was almost an empty void of sound and air, and it lasted for a blissful few minutes until Will exclaimed, "Holy _shite_. You're pining over a pull?"

"Shut up, Will," Merlin said. He tallied the inventory. It had been a busy night -- the thick fog didn't help -- and they were nearly depleted of some of the essentials. He'd have to resupply before the next shift and beg Elena to dispatch another ambulance for the next big trauma emergency. When he finally turned around, it was to see Will staring at him with incredulity. "Look. You've known me, what, three years? You're only just bringing this up _now_?"

Will scratched his head and had the good grace to look at least momentarily abashed. "Freya. Wait. What. You've been pining over this guy for _three years_?"

"What?" Merlin touched the middle of his forehead with his thumb and winced.

"And, anyway, it's not me who's noticed. It's Freya. She keeps mentioning it. Says you look sad, sometimes. I tell her that I think you look constipated. She thinks we should hook you up, make you forget this other bloke --"

Merlin rolled his eyes.

"-- also, are you crackers? Three years? Because if he hasn't shown up by now, he's probably not arsed about you, I'll have you know --"

Merlin stood up, crouching to keep from hitting his head on the roof of the ambulance, and jumped out. He walked past Will and headed to the supply closet to get a few extra items. It wasn't that they were hurting for anything, but if they were going to be sent out again for the remainder of their shift, it was better to be safe than sorry. Also, he wanted to avoid the rest of this conversation with Will, but unfortunately, Will was like a pit bull sometimes. He took a big bite of things he shouldn't, and didn't let go until he got bored.

When he walked out of the supply room, a few boxes tucked under his arm, Will was still talking.

"-- three bloody years, mate. I mean, really? It must have been the fuck of the ages. The sort that literally did make the world move, caused a total eclipse of the moon, and almost got us hit by Haley's comet --"

"Who's a good fuck?" Elena asked, sticking her head out of her office. Merlin glanced skyward, because Elena was like a bat with sonar, or something, because she could hear juicy gossip drop from a kilometre away.

"Nobody," Merlin said.

"The bloke that Merlin's been pining over for the last _three years_ ," Will said, the emphasis on the last two words coloured by mortification. Merlin glanced at him with a raised brow.

"Said the man who swore up and down he'd never be with a bird for longer than a couple of weeks, and you've been with Freya, what, two years?"

"Two years, six months, three weeks, four days," Will trailed off to check his watch. "Aaaaand three hours forty four minutes."

Merlin and Elena turned at once to stare at Will.

"What?"

"That's _adorable_ ," Elena cooed.

"Who are you and what have you done to Will?" Merlin asked, taking a suspicious step back.

Will made a rude, two-fingered gesture in their direction. "You're one to talk, Ellie. You're mad in lust with that copper with the shiny hair, but you won't even ask him out."

Elena returned the rude, two-fingered gesture with more gusto, adding on a frown and pouty lips.

"And you, you're on this stupid serial monogamy kick for this bloke that you've shagged _once_ , three years ago. You don't even know his name, his number, _anything_ about him except that he did something fantastic to your cock and ruined you for the rest of the population." Will paused, and clarified, "The male population. The gay part."

Merlin stared at Will for a long time before turning to look hopefully at Elena. "Please tell me you've got a run for us."

"I've got a run for you," Elena said, her tone full of sympathy. She ducked into the office and returned with a piece of paper, adjusting her earpiece with her free hand. "I know it's near the end of your shift, but the coroner's office is backed up, and they could use an extra meat wagon for a body out by the docks."

"You're a peach," Merlin said, plucking the piece of paper out of her fingers.

"Damn right I am," she said. "And I want to hear _everything_ about that awesome shag that you can't forget three years later."

Merlin waved a hand over his head as he headed for the ambulance, Will close on his heels. He climbed in the back, shoved the boxes in their slots, secured the doors, and went to the driver's side. There was blissful silence from Will until they'd turned onto the road, the fog clinging to the buildings. 

"So the bloke --"

"Will," Merlin said, giving his friend a fixed glare before returning his attention to the road. "Drop it."

"But --"

Merlin shook his head.

"I have an idea," Will said, after a long pause. "That copper Elena fancies? I bet we can get her to ask him a favour from the sketch artist on staff. If you can describe him --"

Merlin exhaled in a heavy sigh. 

Will let out a small, frustrated huff. "You know, you should at least let Freya set you up on a blind date or two. Get laid or something, because all this chastity and monogamy isn't healthy --"

"It's not about getting laid," Merlin said, glancing sidelong. Will snorted. "It's not. It's just. We talked for a long time before we, you know --"

"Fucked until you forgot what day of the week it was?" Will supplied.

"Yes, that."

"Fucked until you couldn't walk straight for days?"

"Yeah," Merlin said.

"Fucked until --"

"Will!" Merlin glanced meaningfully at Will, who shrugged.

"Just offering suggestions," he said.

Merlin drove in silence, counting the street lights as they went by, noting how the red and amber and green grew duller and duller in brightness as the fog thickened . "It's just. Me and Arthur, we had a connection, all right --"

"You _lied!_ You told me you didn't know his name!"

Merlin felt a hot flush colouring his cheeks. "I don't. He told me it was Arthur, but you know, thinking back, he might've given me a fake name or something, I don't know. It doesn't matter. It's just, it wasn't only the --"

"Fucking?" Will offered. He quickly held up his hands to say, _no, that's it, I'll stop there_.

"Yeah. I liked him, Will. I really did. Then I woke up and he was just… gone." Merlin didn't add how every piece of clothing that Arthur had worn had vanished, including the handkerchief that Arthur had given him the night before to sop up the stew that Merlin had spilled onto his shirt. He didn't mention that the window had been shut, that the door had been closed, that both had been locked from the _inside_. Arthur had disappeared without a trace, as if he didn't exist, as if he had been a figment of his imagination, but Merlin didn't have any time to think too much on it at the time, because when he'd woken up, there had been an uproar.

All of his surviving squad members had been dead.

It hadn't been until later, much later, that Merlin thought about how strange it all had been, from the very beginning when Arthur made an appearance and introduced himself to every member of his team, buying them drinks and finally sitting next to Merlin for the remainder of the evening. Arthur had been aloof, distant, detached. Merlin would go so far as to say that Arthur had been _uninterested_ , even, up until he hadn't been. It was as if Merlin had been able to tease a smile out of Arthur every time he used Arthur's name, that a glimmer of curiosity had sparkles in his blue eyes whenever Arthur asked him a question and Merlin had answered, that the surprise lessened bit by bit the more they conversed and argued and laughed.

Merlin hadn't known what had come over him at that moment, when he'd leaned in and kissed Arthur and admitted his attraction in a time and a place when both had been severely frowned upon, but the softness that had overcome the man had more than made up for Merlin's slip.

"Earth to Merlin," Will said.

"Uh --" Merlin slowed down and stopped at the red light before frowning at Will. "What?"

"You were pining again, weren't you?"

"Shut up," Merlin said.

The silence lasted however long it took before the light changed, and Will said, "So the guy did a walk of shame. Big deal. And he didn't steal anything, yeah? I'd say it's win-win. I can't tell you how many times I've woken up wishing to _God_ that I hadn't drunk so much the night before and that I were still sloshed, because then I wouldn't feel it when I tried to chew my own arm off --"

Merlin snorted. 

"-- but count yourself lucky, yeah? You didn't have to deal with the aftermath. No awkward, _nice one, mate, now get the fuck out_ or trying to figure out if you should offer them breakfast, which is a really bad idea however you look at it --" 

The military police had come down on the makeshift airfield like a murder of crows. Their numbers included several men wearing suits and black hats, and _that_ could only mean the British secret service -- maybe MI5, maybe GCHQ. They'd investigated everyone, including the tavern keeper, even Merlin himself, but they'd come up with nothing. All of the men had either died in their sleep with no known cause, or had succumbed to their injuries -- injuries that were no more threatening than a knock to the head or a scuffed knuckle. Merlin had been there when the locals were questioned, lingering in the background as unobtrusively as possible, but none of those who had been at the tavern that night mentioned Arthur. It was like they'd forgotten him. Or that Arthur didn't exist.

Maybe Arthur _had_ been a figment of Merlin's imagination. The waitress had told Merlin that she hadn't seen a blond bloke with him on that night -- a good looking redhead, maybe, who reminded her of her beau who was fighting on the front. The tavern keeper who'd brought over their beers had shaken his head and said, "I don't remember what her name was, that pretty brunette you were talking to, but I thought she looked a bit like my wife when she were younger."

It was as if Merlin hadn't been speaking to Arthur at all. A whole village full of different people had sat with him, apparently.

Between that and the way Arthur had dropped off the face of the earth, Merlin could only chalk it up as one of the many weird things that he'd seen in his life, up to and including the fact that Merlin had magic and that he _couldn't die_.

He slowed down as he approached their destination, turning on the high beams in the hopes of cutting through the fog. Police lights flashed through the misty shroud, reflecting from one building or another, and Merlin turned left, emerging into a pocket of clarity. The fog teased and curled around the street corners, clung to the brickwork, even played with the sewer vents, but at least here, there was a chance to work without tripping onto the body while trying to find it.

An uniformed copper waved him through the mockery of police tape and Merlin parked as close to the ring of policemen in and out of civvies as he could. He turned off the engine and glanced at Will.

At Will, who'd been quiet for what seemed to have been some time, and who was now giving Merlin a strange, flabbergasted look. Merlin frowned and tried to remember what Will might have said -- maybe he'd asked a question that Merlin hadn't answered… "What?"

"Goddamn. You're really tits over arse over this bloke, aren't you?"

Merlin grunted and left the ambulance. He went to the back, fished out one of the body bags from the locked drawer, the one he kept locked because the last thing a patient needed to see was the black bag coming flying out when Merlin reached for the IV lines in the drawer right above it, and left Will to deal with the gurney. He spotted a few familiar faces and walked up to the biggest and friendliest.

"Someone's overdone it with the fog machines tonight," Merlin said, stopping next to Detective Inspector Percival Thompson. Percival flipped his notebook closed before Merlin could peek at his notes and gave him a curt, grumpy nod.

"What are you doing here?" Squeaky-voiced Detective Constable Cedric Moseburth asked, rubbing a finger on his latest attempt at a manly moustache. "We need a hearse, not an ambulance."

"Coroner's busy. This is my last shift call," Merlin said. He glanced at Percival. "What have you got? A hit and run? With this fog, I wouldn't be surprised --"

"Not a hit and run," Percival said. His brows pinched into a frown.

The forensic technician was filling up a camera's memory card with one million shots of the same body part taken at different angles -- and multiple shots of the same angle. When the man moved aside to get another few pictures, Merlin couldn't help his sharp intake of breath.

The patient -- the _victim_ \-- was a man in his mid-to-late thirties, his dark hair in a salt-and-pepper mass of tightly coiled curls, his eyes a washed-out shade of baby blue and open wide in a mixture of stunned shock. His cheek was a five o'clock scruff, his mouth open to show a crooked line of overbite, his lips split and dry and cut, but there was no blood anywhere on his face except where there was secondary splash from his more noticeable wounds.

And by noticeable, Merlin meant _noticeable_ , because the man looked like he'd been mauled by a bear. Never mind that there hadn't been any bears in England since sometime in the tenth century, never mind that there were no obvious claw marks, never mind that the man wasn't mauled -- it looked more as if something had dug its... teeth? Its fingers? ... into the man's chest and had torn out pectoral muscle, shoulder muscle, skin, clothing, and all.

"Fucking hell," Merlin said. His stomach roiled at the sight. He'd seen worse, far worse, in his long lifetime, but this was... "Fucking hell."

"You said it," Percival rumbled quietly. The Detective Inspector half-turned to Merlin, nudging him with the business end of his elbow. "What do you think?"

"I'm not a coroner," Merlin protested, even though he'd been, _once_ , years ago, back when the science was still new and the pathology was shite and fingerprinting hadn't even come into vogue quite yet. 

"As a medical man," Percival amended. "Since the pathologist isn't here for a first look. I need _something_ , Merlin. The investigation's stuck until we know what we're looking for. There's no CCTV, no witnesses. All we've got is Thornbull walking out of that pub down there --"

Percival nodded across the street. Merlin scanned the block, but it wasn't hard to miss the The Bangers Club. 

"-- at just shy of two A.M. Then those two --"

Percival gestured -- without actually gesturing -- toward two men, both still in their blue collar blues, ties loose around their necks, hair standing up on end either deliberately or as a result of a hair gel disaster. They were wavering on their feet so much that Merlin could hear the slosh of alcohol in their bellies. 

"-- tripped over the body, had an argument over who should call the cops, and finally rang up 999 right before three."

Merlin was surprised that the two men weren't more aware of their surroundings than they were now. Falling over a body like this, especially _this_ body, would stun anyone stone cold sober. He glanced past them at the group lingering outside of the bar. They were bored; some of them were sipping their drinks openly, daring the coppers to do something about it. Merlin caught a flash of blond hair --

He couldn't help it. Even after all these years, Merlin always took a second look at fit blond blokes. He couldn't tell what the man on the corner looked like beyond the long trench coat and dark trousers. The fuzzy streetlight behind him and the fog made it hard to make out any actual features.

"Give or take the space of an hour, the lack of drag marks, and no tyre pattern on him, I figure he dropped solid in the road after walking out of the pub."

"Right," Merlin said, forcing himself to look down again. Percival already had sequence-of-events, and that meant that Merlin didn't have to stick a thermometer in the body to get its temperature to calculate the time of death. Merlin was relieved; he had hated doing that even back in the late 1800s. He blinked a few times to clear his mind, and studied the scene more clinically.

"What do you figure?" Percival asked.

"Give me a second," Merlin said. He chewed his bottom lip and glanced from side to side, taking in the scene. "Not a lot of blood and no drag marks? I don't think that wound is what killed him."

Percival grunted. "What did?"

"You'll have to talk to your friendly neighbourhood coroner for that one, because I have no idea," Merlin said.

"What can do that? Moseburth figures a claw hook, like those the butchers use --"

Merlin crouched down for a better look. Or rather, he crouched down for an _other_ look.

The modern era made most of Merlin's magic superfluous. There was no need to cast a spell for fire to warm his campsite when a match or a lighter would do just as well. Securing his apartment? Video cameras and security systems. Even getting from place to place using the transit system in a city or buying a plane ticket had made Merlin lazy. But no matter how far technology had come in the last century, there were still some things that magic could do far better.

If anyone asked -- not that anyone would, because after almost a thousand years, Merlin had learned how to keep secrets -- Merlin would say that his magic worked like another sense, if a sense could create, mould and shape objects, expand awareness, and warp reality. It had taken him a long time to get a grasp on his power, even with training. Magic users had been few and far between back in the day, and they were fewer and further between now. Where teaching and learning could only take him so far, Merlin had picked up the rest on his own through research and experience, and it was experience that guided his magic now.

He _saw_ that the wounds were streaked with something black and tarry; he could _smell_ the rot and the decay of the grave; he _felt_ an unnatural shiver run down his spine, like jagged fingernails scraping along his skin.

All these were traces that were faint and growing fainter by the minute, but they were still strong enough to make Merlin's magic flare out with violent recoil at the wrongness of it all.

The numbered evidence markers toppled onto their sides. A brush of wind rustled clothing and hair and fog. A distant manhole clattered, the line of streetlights flickered, and one of the closest police cruisers jarred and honked its horn.

"Jesus fuck!" someone cried out. The coppers milling about the scene paused and looked around, alarmed, their nerves on edge. Percival shuffled his weight from one foot to the other. An Inspector that Merlin didn't know coughed awkwardly and nervously, and someone peed their pants a little, if Merlin's temporarily enhanced sense of smell was anything to go by.

He didn't know what this was, and he didn't want to know. 

Merlin stood up abruptly, revolted.

"So? What is it?" Percival asked, his voice betraying only the slightest waver.

Merlin took a breath to answer with another half-hearted shrug and a helpless _I don't know_ when Will offered his opinion. "Oi. Looks like Jack the Ripper and Freddy Krueger had a baby, and the baby got loose."

 

****

 

**

**ooOOoo**

**

 

****

Arthur didn't know why he stayed. It wasn't as if anyone could even _see_ him at this point; he didn't want to be seen right now, and he wouldn't be. He had other, pressing duties to attend to. They nagged at him, like bugs crawling under his skin, but he sternly reminded himself that the universe wasn't going to implode just because the balance was a little more out of proportion than it usually was for a few more hours.

He told himself that he stayed because he had a morbid fascination with watching mortals fly into hysterics when they stumbled over a bloody corpse. He'd always been curious to see how they handle a body -- it changed from year to year, from location to location. There had been a time where bodies were thrown onto already heavily-laden carts, and another when people sank bodies -- living or dead -- into the bogs, for instance. He had to admit to failing to understand the dual fascination and fear that most humans had for death in all its forms, from the presence of a dark spectre (usually Arthur) or a cold chill (their imagination) to a bloated floater recently come ashore or a twitching body slowly decomposing after the onset of rigor mortis.

He stayed because he was curious. Gods could be curious. Demi-Gods could be, too. It was curiosity, nothing more. 

The scene that unfolded in front of him was familiar, though he'd never paid much attention to it before. The police had arrived on scene and secured the site. Uniforms were placed at either end of the road to divert traffic and pedestrians. Flimsy yellow tape blocked the way between wooden barricades dragged out of the way for other police vehicles and -- at one point -- an ambulance. The plainclothes policemen would stand around the cooling body and stare down at it as if it might sit up and tell them how it had died. The uniforms were asking people questions and jotting furiously in their notebooks. 

It was all very anti-climatic. Even the watching crowds heaved sighs of boredom and slowly dispersed.

Arthur stood on the street corner and thought, perhaps, he should continue on his way, too, but what he really wanted was for everyone to _go away_ so that he could take another look at the body. 

It occurred to Arthur that he should have chased the creature and destroyed it, because it was an abomination of a living death. It also occurred to Arthur that to do so would mean to have to _feel_ that awful, paralyzing emotion once again. What was it that he'd called it in his head? Fear?

He shuddered involuntarily.

They had wrapped Thornbull in a thick black bag, hefted him onto the rolling gurney, and slid him into the back of the ambulance. The policemen were scattering, though the majority were heading down the street in what Arthur could only assume was a search for evidence and a canvassing of the neighbourhood. The uniformed men moved the barriers out of the way, and the ambulance inched forward slowly, pausing at the red light on the corner.

There were two men in the ambulance, tired and scruffy. A man with short brown hair drummed his thumbs to a staccato rhythm on the steering wheel while he waited for the lights to change. The man in the passenger seat twisted around, grabbed a clipboard, and started writing notes.

The glare of the streetlights made it a little difficult to see any details, but when the man raised a hand to knuckle his drowsy eyes and to cover up a yawn, Arthur paused and _killed_ the streetlight behind him.

The light winked out.

The driver glanced up but didn't stop drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. The passenger startled and turned his head and looked right at Arthur.

Right at him.

Arthur froze for the second time that night.

His hair was longer now than it had been the first time they'd met, but it was still wild and unruly. His eyes were rounded with surprise and a shade of blue that Arthur hadn't had a name for until the modern age and saw for himself the meaning of the phrase _electric blue_. His soft, perfect mouth had dropped open and formed a word.

A name.

_Arthur?_

Arthur heard himself answering, "Merlin?"

The passenger door to the ambulance was shoved open; a clipboard crashed on the asphalt, and the next thing Arthur knew, he was running away from Merlin.

He shouldered the edge of an alley wall, closing his eyes tightly, using his power to make himself invisible. Merlin shouldn't have been able to see him in the first place. Merlin shouldn't have known he was there. _Merlin shouldn't be alive at all_.

Arthur had killed him. Arthur had --

He could hear the clack of boots slapping on the cement sidewalks, as the rhythm slowed and came to a stuttering stop. He heard heavy breathing and someone -- _Merlin_ \-- muttering about being out of shape and _where did he go?_

And silence.

Then: "Arthur?"

Arthur's head knocked back against the brick wall. How was it that Merlin was alive? How --?

"Arthur? Was that you?"

He was dead. He was dead. He was _supposed_ to be dead. As far as Arthur was concerned, he'd severed the life line that kept Merlin alive to restore the balance -- all that Arthur had known at the time was that Merlin's entire squad should not have survived the dogfight against the Germans during the war, and those who had walked away had been taken care of earlier in the evening. He'd saved Merlin for last -- because... Because --

Despite his momentary indiscretion, Arthur was certain that he had _ended_ Merlin. But something must have gone wrong. He was obviously alive. Arthur felt a sudden panic: he should not have caved in to this beautiful man's guileless smile or his sparkling eyes. He should not have been swayed by the flirtatious glances, he should not have succumbed to Merlin's whispered seduction. He should not have. He should not --

But how could he have resisted the temptation this one time? The illusion that this man was seeing _him_ instead of some other "Arthur" that Merlin had spent company with? He'd been bemused at first, how Merlin had seemed to respond to whatever Arthur had said -- his expression, his emotion, his reaction, his words. Merlin should not have been able to hear what Arthur had said -- Merlin should have been enchanted by Arthur's glamour to hear whatever it was that he had wanted to hear in his last living hour. It had only been a _coincidence_ that their conversation had been so seamless, so perfect --

As if they had really had been having a conversation, for real, just the two of them.

"Arthur?" This time, Merlin's voice was small, almost a sob.

Emotion swelled in Arthur's chest. It was full and encompassing and it _hurt_. It pressed against his heart and caused a stutter; it shoved at his lungs and made him catch his breath; it forced a stone down his gullet and weighed heavily and uncomfortably in his belly.

Merlin. Merlin was alive.

It was a night that Arthur couldn't understand, full of strange emotions and supernatural subterfuge. A weighty fog, a creature without a name. A mourning demi-God, a man back from the dead.

There was a strangled sound from the street. It sounded close; in arm's reach if only Arthur would emerge from the alley. Shuffling footsteps wavered in place, weaving backward, turning in a circle, moving forward.

"I'm going mad. I'm going _mad_ ," Merlin was saying, haunted. "I'm going sheer bloody _nutters_."

Arthur was thinking the same thing. He crept from his hiding place and stopped where he was, his shoulder braced against the sharp, painful edge of the brick building. Merlin ran his hand over his head, his fingers curling into fists, and he yanked at his hair, hissing in pain.

"Merlin," Arthur said, wanting him to stop.

Merlin's head snapped up, his hands in mid-pull. There was so much… emotion in Merlin's eyes that it froze time. 

_Anguish_ , Arthur decided, and the word settled in the pit of his stomach and made him ill to know he was the one responsible for Merlin's suffering.

Arthur couldn't breathe. Neither could Merlin, it seemed.

The moment was broken when Merlin dropped his hands. He didn't blink, he didn't look away. And when he spoke, he asked, "Are you real?"

Arthur was so surprised by the question that he didn't know how to answer.

Merlin's hoarse laugh was grating on the ears. "No, of course not, because I've snapped. Finally. I knew it would happen someday. Because there's no way that the man I spent a night with in some shite, run-down tavern in the cow's tail-end of the French countryside after going head-to-head with the most vicious Luftwaffe squadron I've ever fought in bloody _1944,_ could possibly be standing in front of me, fit and gorgeous and _not a day older_."

Merlin's eyes were fixed on Arthur. Abruptly, he tore his gaze away and stared up at the foggy night, taking a deep, shuddering, _pained_ breath. 

He walked away.

"You're one to talk," Arthur said, breaking his silence, because he couldn't stand the thought of… Of what? Of being alone? Of Merlin leaving him? Of never seeing Merlin again? Any of it, he decided, and a dull pang stabbed him in the chest.

"I -- I what?" Merlin whirled around. He stormed toward Arthur, and Arthur's breath caught. He'd seen Merlin laughing. He'd seen him smile. He'd seen him sad and trying to hide it. He'd seen Merlin moan in pleasure, gasping Arthur's name, begging for more. 

But this was an angry Merlin, and Arthur was suddenly… unsure. "You're not a day older, either," Arthur tried.

Merlin pressed his lips together. He covered his mouth with his fingers. He chewed the inside of his cheek, his expression twisting into something furious and malevolent, building and building until it became so large that it collapsed under its own weight. Merlin's shoulders slumped, and he rubbed his face with the palms of his hands.

"How are you alive?" Arthur asked. He wanted to know. He needed to know.

Merlin flung out his hand to wave over Arthur. "How are _you_ alive? I thought -- I thought I was the only one. Are you -- Are you like me?"

Arthur's brows pinched. He tilted his head, struggling to understand what Merlin meant. "Like… you?"

Realization dawned on Merlin's face only to be quickly replaced by confusion. "You're not," he said flatly. "You're not. Then, _how?_ "

The rumble of an engine simultaneously muffled and enhanced by a thickening fog startled them both. Headlights and high beams barely cut through the dark.

"Oh, _God_ ," Merlin said, casting his eyes heavenward again, blowing out a breath of frustration. "I don't… That's Will. Look. He's… He doesn't know. I mean. It's not important. We've got… There's this thing I have to do --"

"He can't see me," Arthur said, and somehow, his words simultaneously calmed Merlin and made him all the more anxious.

"So, I _am_ nutters, then. You're a figment of my imagination --"

"No, no. I am here. I'm here," Arthur said hurriedly, taking a step forward. He wanted to reach out and touch Merlin to reassure him in the way he'd seen mortals do, and in the next moment wondered where that _want_ had come from, because he could not touch people on a capricious whim without them... suffering for it. 

Merlin unconsciously responded by reaching out, and Arthur jerked back, out of reach. Hurt coloured Merlin's expression, his fingers curled in the air, and he dropped his hand.

"I --" Arthur trailed off, not sure what to say. The words came tumbling out. "It's just that. He can't see me. I don't want him to see me. I can make people see what they want to see when they look at me. Even you."

He flinched. Why had he even said that? Merlin's frown was unbearable to look at, his eyes darkening with more questions than answers -- questions that Arthur had hoped to avoid. Merlin didn't understand, that much was obvious, and that was all right, but something had broken in Arthur, because he couldn't stop talking.

"It's a glamour. It affects mortals. I don't know what you see when you look at me. Some past lover, someone you've always wanted, or a resemblance to a person you've met once, ages ago, and had forgotten. You're not even hearing what I'm really saying, either. It's just... lucky that it feels almost as if we're having a conversation."

Merlin's brow pinched. He was bewildered, and _that_ was a new emotion for Arthur, and he hadn't realized that, yes, he was bewildered, too, because Merlin should not be standing in front of him now, and perhaps his power was playing tricks on him. 

"But we _are_ having a conversation," Merlin said, again, impossibly answering Arthur the way he had back during the Second World War; his answers fitting with Arthur's even though they weren't even talking about the same thing. "And I'm hearing you. I'm seeing _you_. I'm seeing --"

Merlin cut himself off, and Arthur stared at him, confused by the way that Merlin blinked furiously, as if he had something in his eyes. 

"I've missed you," Merlin whispered.

Arthur's chest felt warm and fluttery, some of the ache and pain gone, now; it was a new feeling that brought a rare smile to his lips and made him duck his head. _I missed you, too,_ he started to say, because it was the truth, because there hadn't been a moment since that night that Arthur hadn't caught himself thinking about Merlin, or that he would think twice about touching someone who even had a passing resemblance to him. The longer the silence stretched, the more the words suffocated them; words were powerful things when one was a demi-God, and Arthur needed to release them. "I --"

The long, repetitive _bleee--aaaaaaaa--uuuuuuu-----rrrrrrrr_ of a car horn cut him off. Merlin whirled around, and although the fog was like soup, they could still see the man in the driver's seat of the ambulance, sticking his head out. "Merlin! The _fuck_ are you doing?"

"I'm checking something! Give me a minute!"

"What the bloody heck could you be checking out in this flipping _muck_?"

"I thought I saw something! Shut up! I --"

Arthur took a step back, ducking into the alley again, wanting to leave Merlin to his life -- his _impossible_ life, the one that Arthur couldn't quite wrap his head around. Merlin was alive, and it was a beautiful, strong life to Arthur's senses, neither borrowed nor stolen. Pure, crisp, clean, the way that it had been that night in the French tavern after the dogfight he wasn't supposed to survive, but had, somehow. Death, when it set its target on something, could not be cheated, but Merlin had survived a Reaper's touch, too.

"Saw _what?_ The man in the ambulance asked. "Did you see a bloody _bear_ trotting along? Or maybe you saw Jack the Ripper junior? Or the werewolf of London? You're not a copper, you don't get paid for skulking around tracking killers and getting your own arse killed in the process. Leave that shite to Percy and Leon and Gwaine -- it's their bloody _job_ \--"

"Fucking _Hell_ , Will!" Arthur retreated even more into the darkness of the alley. This couldn't be _his_ Merlin. It was his imagination. His Merlin had never sworn except in delirious mutterings in the middle of sex, his legs wrapped around Arthur's thighs, his fingers clawing down Arthur's arms. But this was also an angry, frustrated Merlin, a Merlin trying to get a grasp on the situation, and Arthur had never seen that before. All he could think about was how he had named this man _his_.

The claim made Arthur feel as if he were drowning. Arthur didn't hear what else Merlin said, because he turned around abruptly and stalked down the alley.

Footfalls hurried after him. Arthur picked up the pace. He could _Step_ aside. He could leave this alley at any time. But it wasn't working. Something was keeping him rooted where he was.

"Please don't leave me again," Merlin said, his voice breathless, and a moment later a hand clamped down on Arthur's shoulder, turning him around almost violently. Arthur was too stunned to react -- someone had dared _touch_ him? -- and he was pushed against a dumpster.

Panic filled him. Merlin had touched him. Merlin had --

Merlin stepped into Arthur's space, the heat of his body chasing away a chill that Arthur hadn't known had seeped deep into his bones. Hands cradled Arthur's face, fingers gentle against his cheek, palms firm and guiding, and --

He should wrench his head away. He should push Merlin aside. It was bad enough that Merlin had laid a hand on him, that now he was touching him skin-to-skin -- if his days hadn't been numbered from the very first touch, his death was almost a certainty now.

\-- and...

Merlin kissed him.

His lips were as soft and as firm and as perfect as Arthur remembered them. Curious and questing, chaste with uncertainty, pressing but not pushing --

Arthur should shove him away, but it was too late. He should try to warn Merlin before he succumbed. He should try to _fix_ it, to mend and weave the damaged strand of life that was almost impossible to repair after he had touched someone or had been touched. Instead, his hands drifted to Merlin's hips, fingers hooking in the thick leather belt around his waist, and held him firm.

The first time had not been his only chance with Merlin. He had this chance, too, this moment to keep a hold of Merlin, to keep touching him, because death didn't creep in until they stopped touching.

He responded to Merlin's kiss, hungry, greedy, desperate --

Merlin was the one to push him away, gasping for air, taking an unsteady step back that made Arthur's entire being flare with panic, but Merlin didn't fall. Arthur couldn't see Merlin clearly in the darkness, but he could hear the rustle of fabric and feel the crinkle of paper when something was shoved into his hand.

"Look. Look. Call me. _Please_ call me," Merlin said. He walked backward a few steps before turning to trot down the alley just as Will leaned on the horn again.

Arthur watched him go, counting the steps, hating himself, hating _everything_ , but when Merlin didn't fall, when he didn't succumb, when he didn't die, when he raised two rude fingers at Will and vanished around the ambulance to climb in the passenger side, Arthur realized...

Merlin didn't die.

 

****

 

**

**ooOOoo**

**

 

****

There were too many calls. And none of them were from Arthur.

More than once, Merlin had checked one of the business cards that he had given Arthur to make sure it had his contact information. The switchboard's direct number and the non-emergency assistance numbers were on the card. His name. The branch address. 

He had hundreds of these business cards -- it had been a whim of Elena's that no one could rationalize or even understand -- but he made a habit of handing them out to people on the street who might need help. Kids who didn't know where the shelters were and who needed a safe place to stay; a homeless shelter for transients who were hungry; people who might need a bit of legal counsel after getting in a tousle with their common-law spouses or who needed to know where they could go to get away. None of the business cards had Merlin's cell phone number, and that meant Elena would answer the switchboard when Arthur called.

If he called.

Merlin made a point of asking Elena once a day -- at least -- to see if anyone had rung for him. Once, he asked four times in under an hour and a half, and her eyebrow had raised nearly to her hairline in suspicion. He'd learned to be a bit more subtle since then, even if it meant sending Will in to get their messages.

Will was, thankfully, a little thick. He hadn't noticed that Merlin was sick with anticipation and self-doubt. Arthur would call, Merlin was certain of it. He would.

He hadn't. 

Will accused him of _pining_. And this time, he was right. Before he saw Arthur again, Merlin had been _mourning_ his loss. Now? It was definitely pining. His heart ached, and he kicked himself all the time for having left Arthur, for having walked away like a fool. If he'd been smarter, he would have shouted at Will to take care of their passenger, to drop it off at the morgue, to deal with the paperwork himself _for once, goddamn it_ , and he would have taken Arthur home.

He shouldn't have left Arthur out of his sight.

It had been nearly a fortnight, and there was no sign of Arthur. No phone calls. No messages. No fit blond blokes in the crowds every time Merlin scanned the streets, searching for him.

And maybe… maybe the whole thing had been his imagination. Maybe he'd deluded himself. The fog, the gruesome crime scene, the long shift. He'd been tired. 

Except Merlin had touched Arthur, had put a hand on a firm shoulder, had pushed Arthur against a dumpster. The kiss had been real. Merlin's lips still tingled. 

The days and nights blurred together in a mass of calls and overtime and double shifts. His only day off had been an aborted attempt to catch up on sleep when the day shift operator, Helen, rang his cell and asked him to come in because they were _swamped_. 

And by swamped, Helen meant that the number of random violent attacks had outnumbered the number of house visits for medical emergencies. Merlin hadn't even noticed until she'd pointed it out.

Worse, because of all the attacks, the stock room was regularly low on gauze and antiseptic and saline. Merlin knew he shouldn't, but he was desperate, and he didn't think the hospital would mind too much if he borrowed a few boxes when he was in a pinch. Like now.

He was walking out of the stock room -- he'd had to restrain himself from taking double what he needed and from grabbing non-standard ambulance supplies -- when he crashed into someone who hadn't been there a second ago. His armful went flying. There was a mad scramble of hands trying to catch everything before it landed on the pale green linoleum floor, a resettling of the equipment to make sure he wouldn't drop anything else, and a panicked moment of _I've been caught_ until he realized who he'd run into.

Lance eyed him up and down with a raised brow and asked, "Not you, too?"

"Yeah. Um. What?" Merlin frowned and narrowed his eyes in the hopes that he'd be able to divine what Lance meant. He looked Lance over -- standard greens, a stethoscope around his neck, his ID badge hanging from his breast pocket, his trouser pockets overflowing with fresh spare gloves. Lance's eyes were bloodshot with exhaustion and he looked as if he were operating on nothing but willpower, which was a damn sight better than Merlin, who had resorted to caffeine a long time ago.

"You're the third paramedic to raid our stores," Lance said. "Don't they feed you at the ambulance stations?"

"They would, if we ever had time to stop for a resupply," Merlin said wryly. A package threatened to slip out of his grasp, and he pressed down with his chin to catch it. Lance chuckled humourlessly, but he moved out of the way to let Merlin pass. He reached into the stock room, grabbed a Tupperware bin of gauze, tossed some extra odds and ends to fill it up, and joined Merlin in the corridor. Merlin eyed the container before raising a brow. "And how bad is it?"

"I'm afraid to look," Lance said. "I haven't been off for the last two weeks. I think Gwen made it home once. Maybe."

Gwen was Lance's partner and love of his life; she was also the trauma specialist. Between Gwen and Lance, they had the A&E under control on any given night, but the rash of attacks had everyone running ragged.

"By the way? That kid you brought in this morning?"

"You mean yesterday?" Merlin asked. The little girl couldn't have been more than twelve, memorable because she'd screamed the entire way to the hospital.

"Yes…ter…day…?" Lance asked, drawing out the syllables as if he were trying to sort out the days. He gave up, shook his head miserably in defeat, and said, "Whenever. She's fine. Or, she'll be fine. It'll take a while. She won't get full range of movement back. The muscle damage was too deep."

Merlin shook his head in disgust. The more he responded to the attack calls and saw the damage for himself, the more he realized that the placement of the injuries were nearly identical. The wounds were inflicted on the large muscle groups of the body -- the upper leg, mostly, the long muscle in the back, the shoulder and chest -- and none of them were life-threatening. Crippling, yes, but not life-threatening, though they had lost several patients from massive blood loss.

It made Merlin think about the corpse he and Will had gone to pick up two weeks prior. The only difference between that attack and the ones that had been happening with increasing frequency was that the muscle damage had occurred after the man was already dead. Merlin had been able to tell the Detective Inspector at least that much after casual observation -- after the group of coppers had finished tittering with suppressed half-panicked laughter at Will's Jack the Ripper and Nightmare on Elm Street crack.

Abruptly, Lance came to a stop. "Jesus, Merlin. What's going on?"

Merlin blinked at him. "How would I know?"

"You've got friends in the police, don't you? More than me, anyway. Isn't Percival on the task force? Can't you ask him?"

"God, Lance, Percy's probably just as strung out as the rest of us. More, if you consider he's in charge of the investigation and he's got politicians breathing down his neck to hurry up and find the bastards doing this."

"So it's true, then?"

"Mhmm? What?" Merlin frowned, trying to keep up. He felt as if his brain was running on molasses speed. "What's true?"

"What they're saying in the media? That it's a cult of serial mutilators? A gang of some sort?"

Merlin gave Lance a long, long look while he sorted through his surprise, confusion, and amazement. Lance's cheeks reddened and he broke eye contact, embarrassed. "You should know better than anyone not to listen to the bloody trash mags. I don't know what's going on and that's mainly because I haven't had the time to do much more than change out of uniform and into a clean one when I get home, never mind catch up on the news or, god forbid, eat and sleep."

Lance glanced down, apologetic, and shifted his Tupperware bin from under one arm to the other. 

"How do you even have the time to --" Merlin shut up as an orderly with a rolling shelving system muscled his way past, heading toward the storage room without so much as an apology. He sighed, shook his head, and raised his brows at Lance. "I'm not feeding your crime drama addiction by bothering Percy when he's eyes-deep in the mire."

Merlin's cell phone buzzed before he could say anything else, but his hands were too full to make a grab for it without dropping everything. 

"Look, that's probably Will, telling me to get my arse out because we've got a call. I should go," Merlin said. Inwardly, he hoped his phone would keep ringing until he could put the supplies down, on the off chance that it might be Arthur.

There had been plenty of off-chances that it might be Arthur. The odds would be in Merlin's favour, someday.

"All right. And be careful out there," Lance said, walking away.

"You too!"

Merlin was nearly at the other end of the corridor when Lance called him. "By the way? We're still on for dinner Friday?"

"Half eight, yeah?" The three of them -- Merlin, Lance and Gwen -- didn't get free evenings off all at the same time very often, and Gwen insisted on celebrating with a dinner party nearly every time.

"Half eight," Lance confirmed. "And Will's not allowed to be your plus-one anymore!"

"Says who?" Merlin asked, walking backward toward the exit.

"Says everyone who wants you to stop pining over that mysterious blond bloke of yours!"

"Oh, God," Merlin said, nearly dying on the spot when the orderly left the storage room and gave Merlin a fixed stare and a raised brow. He was going to kill Will dead. He was going to bring Will back from the dead and kill him again. He was going to do it several times until his rage was sated, and he would do it at least one more time to be absolutely certain that his bloodlust had eradicated his humiliation.

Lance's laughter faded down the corridor. The orderly shook his head and pushed his shelved cart up the other way. Merlin used his elbows to unlatch the door and his bum to push it open.

"You're pining for me?" 

The simultaneous shock of startle and a mad whirlwind turn sent all of the supplies to the floor in a whispery shush of light gauze boxes and heavier thumps of tape and saline bags. Merlin steadied himself against the doorframe when he saw Arthur. He was wearing a suit and tie under his long trench coat, his hair was stylistically tousled, and there was a quirk to his lips that was full of smug self-satisfaction that belied the surprise and delight in his eyes.

Merlin pressed a hand against his chest in a vain attempt to slow his racing heart, and heaved a breath. "You almost gave me a heart attack. I've had one once. I don't want to do that again."

"I didn't mean to startle you," he said. An expression that would suit a chastised puppy far more fell over Arthur's face. Then, after a pause, he tilted his head, his eyebrows pinched in concern. "Are you… all right?"

"'Course," Merlin said, dropping his hand from his chest -- he tried not to flush when he saw Arthur's gaze linger where his hand had been. He tugged his shirt down and brushed his fingers through his hair in a half-hearted and fruitless attempt to make himself both presentable and appealing. He suspected he passed the point of salvage hours ago, but he tried anyway. "Um. Why wouldn't I be?"

Arthur straightened and shook his head and inexplicably shrugged. 

They stared at each other. Merlin hesitated, and glanced down at the floor. "I should pick this up."

He crouched and collected the bag with the saline solutions, tilting it to see if any had burst. He tucked it under his arm, grabbed the intubation kits, and reached for one of several boxes of gauze at the same time as Arthur. Their fingers brushed, the touch hot and electrifying, and Arthur jerked his hand away so fast that he nearly fell backward.

He shot a look of alarm at Merlin and held his breath. Merlin thought Arthur's lips had a touch of blue in them.

"Are _you_ all right?" Merlin asked, and Arthur glanced away. 

"I'm… well," Arthur said. He echoed Merlin's earlier question. "Why wouldn't I be?"

"You're in a hospital?" Merlin said. He picked up the last of the boxes, and Arthur collected a few packages that were out of his reach. When Arthur handed them over, he was careful to make sure that they wouldn't touch. 

It stung. Why... Why wouldn't Arthur want to touch him now?

They stood up at the same time. Arthur shrugged again. "Oh. Yes. I was visiting one of the… victims?"

A shout down the corridor attracted Merlin's attention. He recognized Lance's distinctive baritone over the tumult, calling for a crash cart and shouting for people to get out of the way. 

Neither Arthur nor Merlin said anything until the cacophony disappeared further down a different hallway and it was quiet again.

"Oh. Friend of yours? How are they doing?"

Arthur hesitated, and shook his head. Merlin made a sound of sympathy.

The awkward silence grew.

Merlin lowered his head and chuckled ruefully. "Are we going to do this, then?"

"Do what?" Arthur asked.

"This… this pretending we don't know each other? That we didn't, you know, back in the day?" Merlin said, avoiding specifics, but only because there were too many people walking by who might overhear. When Arthur didn't answer, Merlin pressed on, "I mean. I kissed you, Arthur. It was a really nice kiss. I thought -- well. It doesn't matter what I thought. I hoped you would call, but you didn't."

"I've… been occupied," Arthur said slowly, his brow furrowing. "I'm here now."

Merlin rolled his eyes. "What does that even mean?"

"That I'm here?" Arthur said. Merlin shook his head and turned away, walking toward the ambulance doors. Arthur fell in step with him. "I couldn't call."

Merlin glanced at him. "Why not?"

Arthur considered the question for a long time before saying, "I don't have a telephone."

"You could use _any_ phone, you know. Like, oh, a pay phone. Or that phone there," Merlin said, nodding at the phone on the wall. He paused. "Well, maybe not that phone in particular. It's in-house only. But you know something? _I don't have a telephone?_ That's a really lame excuse, by the way, and believe me, I've heard them _all._ "

He stalked off. 

He couldn't help it. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Arthur studying the hospital phone for an extraordinarily long time before he moved to catch up to Merlin. The furrow in Arthur's brow deepened, and he said, "But I know you're alive now. I know to look for you."

"Oh, for --" Merlin stopped, then skittered out of the way as the ambulance doors clanged open and two EMTs rolled a gurney and a patient through. Arthur moved to stand on the other side of the corridor, and they stared at each other until the rattle and chatter had faded enough to be heard. "Arthur."

"Merlin?" Arthur's eyebrows rose, his confusion replaced by something like hope.

"I can't do this now. I've got to work. I have a lot of work to do. Elena's ears are bleeding from all the calls coming through to the switchboard. People are getting hurt and people are dying and I need to get my ambulance stocked up again because we were nearly caught with our pants down for the last run out. Will is waiting for me and people are having catastrophic meltdowns and…" Merlin paused for breath, but his mouth continued on before his brain kicked in. "… and I don't know if you're really _you_. I don't know if I've been missing you so much that I'm hallucinating."

"You're not hallucinating," Arthur said. His brow furrowed again, and he took a step forward, only to be pushed back against the wall when a nurse hurried past. "You're not. I'm here."

"You left me," Merlin blurted out. "You left me in that icy room and the lumpy bed and I never saw you again."

"I didn't know that you would --" Arthur bit himself off, both mentally and physically; he pressed down so hard on his lower lip that it went white. "I didn't know that --"

"You could've stayed. You could've --" Merlin leaned back, his arms aching from the weight of the medical supplies. He banged his head against the wall, catching the corner of some sort of plaque that he'd never bothered to read in all the time he'd been working as an EMT. "We would've figured it out. We would've _known_. Then we wouldn't…"

Merlin's eyes prickled and his eyes burned and his voice edged toward the shake and tremble of a sob, and he must really be tired, because he didn't even bother to hold back what he wanted to say.

"All these years, Arthur. We wouldn't have had to be alone."

His words were the coffin nail on the conversation, because a curtain of silence surrounded them so completely that Merlin couldn't even hear the distant chatter, the paging system that was almost always on a low drone, the footfalls of people walking by, the ambulance sirens and traffic sounds just outside those doors. The only solace was that Arthur wasn't as unaffected as Merlin had thought, because his eyes drifted to the ugly linoleum floor, his shoulders slumping under the weight of whatever emotion had been weighting him down all this time. When he looked at Merlin, it was with sad eyes, a mouth tight in a line of guilt, some sort of private anguish hidden behind it all.

"I'm sorry," he said, the apology swollen with meaning that Merlin couldn't grasp. There was an echo in his words that made Merlin's heart ache in sympathy. "I am very sorry. If… If I'd known, at the time, I don't think I would have left. I… If it helps, now that I know... I doubt that I could leave you now."

Merlin's heart pounded with an alternating stab of pain and an anxious throb of warmth. All the words left him, and he didn't know what to say. He nodded jerkily instead, wishing that he could say what he was thinking. _I don't want you to._

He startled when his cell phone rang again.

"I have to go," Merlin said, pushing himself from the wall. He headed toward the ambulance bay doors.

"I could be your plus one," Arthur called after him.

Merlin winced. He'd hoped that Arthur hadn't heard that part of the conversation between Merlin and Lance. Merlin turned back to see Arthur standing in the middle of the corridor, looking at once hopeful and uncertain. Merlin caved.

"Call me," Merlin said. The ambulance bay doors slid open automatically. When he looked over his shoulder as the doors slid shut, Arthur was gone.

 

****

 

**

**ooOOoo**

**

 

****

The business card had stayed in Arthur's trouser pockets ever since Merlin gave it to him two weeks ago, and it was by some sort of miracle that it wasn't completely creased and crumpled considering the number of times that Arthur touched it as if it were some sort of worry stone. The faint ink-embossing was permanently etched in Arthur's touch-memory, and he recited the contents over and over in his head like a saving mantra.

_Merlin Emrys_

_Emrys_ , and not _Emerson_ , which had been Merlin's name in 1944. He'd kept his given name, it seemed, and drifted from one version of his surname to another.

 _All these years, Arthur. We wouldn't have had to be alone._  
  
Merlin's words echoed in his head, found refuge in a dark recess, and refused to leave. As much as Arthur wanted to deny the truth or rail against his solitude, Arthur could only think about one thing.

Now, he didn't _need_ to be alone.

The how and the why behind Merlin's survival when by all accounts he should be dead no longer mattered. He was alive. And, most importantly, he was alive without stealing someone's life, without adding to his own by nefarious means. Merlin was in balance. Arthur did not need to hunt him. He did not need to end him. He may never have had needed to end him, and it had been sheer happenstance that Merlin had been a member of a squadron slated for death during the Second World War.

After that first night -- after that kiss -- Arthur had drowned himself in work. Seeing Merlin had awakened emotions that Arthur wasn't prepared for, that he wasn't even certain how to identify, and it was easier to mute the cacophony with responsibility and duty. But there were moments, quiet, inattentive moments, where Arthur would slip a hand into his pocket and feel the business card.

And he would _want_. He would want company. He would want more of Merlin's easy conversation. He would want Merlin.

Whenever he happened to be in England, he would side- _Step_ and stop in London. He would close his eyes and he would reach with all of his senses and he would find Merlin. It wasn't easy, not with a city as densely populated as London. Day by day, Arthur would imprint something of Merlin into himself the same way he had imprinted the card's lettering onto his fingertips, and now, every time that he _wanted_ , he would find himself near Merlin.

It was a happy -- or rather, an unhappy -- coincidence that Arthur happened to be at the hospital to cut the life thread of someone who should have died. The little girl's wounds were severe, her blood loss extreme, and Arthur was baffled -- as he was often baffled -- to know that she survived despite it all. It was sad, but there was no helping fate, and the balance was just as affected by those who were inexplicably saved as those who stole life to extend their own. Afterward, he had been overcome by a lonely sense of longing that swept him up, and a moment later, he found himself outside a corridor, eavesdropping on Merlin's conversation.

And now, he loitered the same hospital corridors, smiling to himself. _Call me_ , Merlin had said, as clear an invitation as anything. 

Euphoria, Arthur realized, was an emotion that he could quickly get drunk on, and it was some time before he came down from its heights to remember that he still didn't know how to use the telephone.

He stared at the different shapes and forms of telephones that he encountered -- the hospital phone that Merlin had pointed to; the telephone in reception; the pay phone in the waiting room. He watched with interest as someone thumbed into a handheld device and brought it to his ear. He listened in on the one-sided conversation until he realized that it wasn't a recorder, but that he was speaking to someone else on the other end. He watched the way that the nurses and residents and orderlies and doctors punched numbers into the olive-green telephone behind their desk, and spoke into the phone.

Sometimes what they said was echoed over the intercom.

One person in the waiting room slid a card into the pay phone, dialled a number, and another number, and waited as the line rang and rang and finally engaged in conversation. Everyone else seemed to be using one of those portable handheld telephones. Arthur wondered where he could get one, but realized he wouldn't have much use for it, not when the only person he would call was Merlin.

He tangled with the pay phone first. He picked up the handset, brought it to his ear, and paused awkwardly before hanging up hurriedly. He tried again, but pay phones were a more complicated monster than the telephone behind the reception desk, and he retreated to try that phone instead. He waited until the area cleared, pressed the number for the external line -- he had noticed _that_ much -- and stared at the card that Merlin had given him until he figured out which number to dial.

"Emergency services, how can I help you?" 

It was a woman's voice, and decidedly not Merlin. Arthur hung up so quickly that the phone skittered across the desk.

Arthur drummed his fingers uncertainly. Merlin had said to call. Calling seemed to be a little outside the sphere of possibility right now -- at least until he had the opportunity to learn how to use the telephone in the first place. There simply had never been a need for him to use one until now.

He sat behind the nurse's station, unseen to everyone, and watched as people walked by in either direction, stop in front of him, have brief conversations. A pretty young woman dropped her files on the counter in front of Arthur, leaned against it with her hip, and rubbed her face in a mixture of exhaustion and grief and frustration. She stood there for some time before taking a deep, steadying breath. Her pen jotted notes in the topmost file, and she added the file to the rack off on the side.

"It'll be all right," a man said, coming up to the woman, squeezing her arm. This was Lance, Arthur recognized, the man that Merlin had been speaking to earlier. Arthur brightened. He could ask Lance about this dinner on Friday.

The woman nodded. "I'm just tired. Is it ever going to stop? Are they ever going to catch who's doing this?"

Lance shook his head. "I don't know, Gwen. I saw Merlin earlier. I asked him if he's spoken to Percy, but he doesn’t know anything."

Gwen tilted her head and rested it against Lance's arm; Lance moved his arm to encircle her, rubbing her back. They were silent for a moment.

"He's going to be gutted," Lance said suddenly. "That little girl -- he's the one who brought her in. I'd just told him that she would be all right."

Arthur frowned, and sat up a little straighter. He couldn't help but feel guilty, and that was an unfamiliar, uncomfortable sensation. He ignored it.

"He'll be fine. He'll understand. We tried our best," Gwen said. She stared at a spot on the wall as if steeling herself, and forced a smile that didn't reach her brown eyes. "He's coming to dinner, isn't he?"

"He said he would."

"And he's not bringing Will again, right? Tell me he's not. We're still finding the beer bottles that Will left all over the flat from the last time."

Lance chuckled. "I have no idea. I told him he wasn't allowed to bring Will anymore --"

Arthur made an executive decision. He stood up, walked around the reception area, dropping the cloak of invisibility. It took a little bit more concentrated effort to make certain that Gwen and Lance would see him without an illusion, but if he meant to come to the dinner party as Merlin's plus-one, he might as well show himself the way Merlin appeared to be seeing him -- without glamour. He approached the couple and cleared his throat. 

"Excuse me, this will seem odd, but would you happen to know anyone working here named Lance and Gwen? They're friends of Merlin?"

The couple exchanged confused glances. It was Gwen who said, "I'm Gwen, but --"

"I'm Arthur," Arthur said quickly, hoping to forestall the suspicion he saw growing in Gwen's expression. Gwen shot another glance at Lance, and the two shared a quick smile. There was no missing the excited spark in Gwen's eyes, either, and Arthur assumed that they knew who he was. He pressed on, "I realize this is unorthodox, but Merlin mentioned that his friends worked here, and..."

Arthur ran a rueful hand through his hair. He wasn't afraid of using a little charm to get his way, whether it was information on the location of someone who was hiding from him or a free drink at a bar. Admittedly, he felt a little rusty, considering that lately he was more prone to relying on brute force to accomplish his duty.

"Well, I was just here visiting a friend, and I remembered what Merlin told me about you, and... this is embarrassing, but I've lost my telephone and his number, and I don't know how to get in touch with him. I don't want him to think I'm avoiding him. I was just wondering --"

"We can most definitely give you his number," Lance volunteered at once, grabbing a piece of paper from behind the nurse's station to jot it down. 

"Actually, I have an idea," Gwen said. She brightened, and it lit up her face. She exchanged a long, silent conversation with Lance in the way that couples who could read each other's minds often did, and the two nodded almost simultaneously. "We're having a small dinner with friends on Friday. Merlin will be there. Why don't you come, too?"

"Oh, I couldn't -- I couldn't impose like that," Arthur said. He tried for self-effacing, but he was sure that he sounded excited, which was all right, because he did want to see Merlin again. "I'm not even sure if Merlin even wants to --"

Lance added an address to the piece of paper. "You definitely will impose like that, mate, because if you're Merlin's Arthur, I can promise you, he'll be dead chuffed that you're there."

Arthur took the information and studied the piece of paper. "If you're sure --"

"Of course we're sure," Gwen said.

"It'll be brilliant," Lance said. "We can tell Merlin to dress up, _definitely_ not bring a date, and make him think we're setting him up --"

"Not that we set him up," Gwen said hurriedly. "Not often, anyways. He's never really gotten on with anyone, to be honest, and, oh, dear. I'm not helping things, am I?"

"No, it's all right," Arthur said, trying to smile, and for once, he found that he couldn't, not even in the spirit of pretending. The mere thought that Merlin might have been with someone else for the last sixty-some years made Arthur vaguely ill for reasons he couldn't even begin to understand. He started to say something else when a loud commotion interrupted him.

A group of people surrounded the gurney that was being pushed down the corridor at high speed, but the patient was obscured by the medic who was straddling the patient and administering CPR. As they raced past -- Arthur found himself squeezing against the nurse's station to stay out of the way while simultaneously _knowing_ that this person wasn't due to expire for years and that they wouldn't survive the next several minutes.

It was such a strong conflict of awareness that Arthur swayed a little, his attention fixed on the patient's arm as it hung from the edge of the gurney, covered in blood that dripped to the floor.

Gwen dashed in to help; she was a blur of movement that disappeared in the mass of bodies swirling around. Arthur snapped out of his daze when Lance came closer, his eyebrows raised in an inquiring _are you all right_ that Arthur wasn't sure how to answer.

He had enough sense to give Lance a shaky grin and to step back before Lance could reach out to steady him. Arthur tried not to touch people as a matter of course -- he had learned the hard way that prolonged physical contact was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, he could keep someone alive as long as they were touching, but the other person would succumb immediately when the connection was broken. On the other, if they weren't meant to die quite yet, they would emerge from the encounter missing several decades of their lifetime. Even an accidental touch could do it.

It was why seeing Merlin again had been such a shock. Their single long night of lovemaking, including several hours of sleeping in each other's arms, should have drained Merlin of whatever life he'd had left if Arthur hadn't already made the _cut_.

It also made Arthur giddy with wonder that maybe, just maybe, he could touch Merlin and not see him fade away. Merlin had asked him, _Are you like me?_ Only to correct himself a second later, with, _No, you're not_ , but there had still been enough hint in Merlin's words that there was something special about Merlin. Something that might even make him immune to Arthur's power.

"I should go and help," Lance said, and he was already moving away. "We'll see you Friday, yeah?"

Arthur nodded. "Friday. And, thank you. I appreciate it."

Lance raised a hand in farewell and left Arthur to himself. He spent several self-satisfied minutes patting himself in the back for having sorted out seeing Merlin again before sighing inwardly and paying attention to the pressing issue at hand -- the fact that there was someone dying who most assuredly should _not_ be dying right now.

From one _Step_ to the next, Arthur disappeared from sight, and he wandered over to watch the proceedings. It wouldn't be the first time that he stood over a doctor's shoulder as they attempted (and failed) to revive the patient, but it was the first time that Arthur wasn't behind it.

The medic had slipped off the gurney and the resuscitation technique had graduated to electrical stimulation and intubation, but Arthur could already see that there was no chance of rescue. Where a healthy man would have a solid, knotted thread that represented his life, holding his soul to his body, this one had _withered_ to the point that it wouldn't take much before it snapped. 

On several levels, this offended Arthur. A normal death simply _ended_ ; there was no withering. It was a nice, clean cut, much like what Arthur used. Sickness could weaken a thread, but the thread was still present in its entirety, though frayed and fraying more, with every potential of being rewoven and strengthened. Even prolonged contact with Arthur could only shorten the thread, not thin nor dissolve it.

This withering was _wrong_. It was foul, tainted, decayed. 

The medical team called time of death with the frustration of people who had simply lost too many and were struggling to find it in them to continue on. Gwen snapped off her gloves and threw them in a nearby hazardous materials bin; she simply turned away and walked off while Lance watched her with the concern of a man who knew he could do very little to alleviate her heartache. Someone reached over and closed the patient's eyes in a last act of dignity.

It wasn't until the group had gone off to their own duties and had closed the curtains around Arthur and the body that Arthur had a good, solid look at the injury.

The man's entire upper torso had been torn open on both sides, ripping shirt and skin and muscle from the upper chest to the shoulder. The blood loss was massive. Arthur didn't doubt the skill of the medical team for one instant, but there simply had been nothing that they could do to save this man.

The injury, however, reminded Arthur of Thornbull, of the creature that had emerged from the thick fog to tear and rend at the body.

He shuddered involuntarily.

Arthur stepped out from the partitioned square without so much as ruffling the curtains; he glanced around with a deepening frown when he took in the sheer number of patients crammed in such a small space. He hadn't noticed it before -- he was usually focused on the task at hand and not much else, but encountering Merlin and speaking with Gwen and Lance had shaken him from his blinders -- but the hospital was bursting at the seams. There were gurneys in the corridor; gurneys wedged into a supplies room; a waiting room had been turned into an impromptu triage.

Arthur closed his eyes and took his time to sort out through the people waiting to be treated and those who had been treated and those who could not be treated, because they had already succumbed to their wounds.

The old man who could no longer walk because someone had knifed his calf while he walked down his neighbourhood.

The two sisters who had been bitten in their upper arms before shrieking, fighting off their assailants, and fleeing the scene.

The firefighter who had been doing a post-fire walk-through of a building to determine the structural integrity and the source of the blaze, who had been attacked from the rear.

The athlete who had been practicing by himself at park, waiting for his friends to show up when he was attacked. His thigh was severely torn, his career in ruins, but he was alive.

They were all alive, each and every one of those that Arthur could sense as being alive, but their threads had been _withered_ to one degree or another.

Scowling, Arthur went down to the morgue. The morgue wasn't much better than the treatment floors. The bodies in the walk-in were nearly piled double. All of the autopsy theatres were full, though from the snippets of conversation that Arthur overheard as he walked through, the cause of death was either very clear-cut, or they had no idea why the person passed on _at all_.

Arthur didn't think that _withered thread of life_ counted as a viable explanation for someone's death, so he headed to the room with the greatest concentration of most-recently dead.

With the dead, Arthur had to focus a whole lot more, because without a soul to sense, it was far too hard to find the thread of life. Once it was cut, that thread retreated into the soul, and the other end was subsumed into the body; it was, quite literally, the Reaper's equivalent of searching for a needle in a haystack.

Arthur's hand hovered over one corpse, his eyes shut in concentration, his brow furrowed. Sweat beaded on his brow despite the cold of the walk-in freezer, but, bit by bit, he could see the withered thread. He checked body after body, but they were all the same.

Withered, but not cut. And therefore, dead, but not dead. Outside of Arthur's purview, and not quite.

Arthur walked in a small, tight circle, surveying the sea of white cloth around him, the bodies barely visible underneath, and tried to make sense of it all. What could do this? What could drain someone so completely of life? Vampires, dhampir, succubi, incubus, any number of demons, any number of the Sidhe -- they all could drain _something_ from a mortal's body, at the cost of the mortal's survival, but not its _life_. Not exactly.

One of the white sheets rippled. Arthur frowned and took a closer look. He lifted the sheet and looked down at the body beneath -- a naked man with a generous middle, the fat settling around the sides under the pull of gravity and decaying cellular matter. Arthur judged him in his mid-to-late forties, still in the prime of his life, a light peppering of white hair in his dark brown.

The man's hand twitched.

Arthur dropped the sheet with a stifled cry and stared at the unmoving sheet for a long, long time. His beating heart wouldn't stop racing. His instinct to flee was overwhelming. He forced himself to stay where he was.

He was a Reaper, _damn it all_. He knew that bodies twitched after death. Muscle fibres shortened or loosened. Rigor mortis set in or apoptosis began. Bugs crawled beneath the rotted flesh to nest and pupate and feast. It was the natural order of things.

The man was dead. He would stay dead.

Arthur had finally convinced himself of that when another white sheet across the room rippled.

He got the _fuck_ out of there.

 

****

 

**

**ooOOoo**

**

 

****

Lance took out a steaming baking dish of homemade lasagne and Mithian cracked open the bottle of red that Merlin had brought to accompany dinner. It smelled really good in the flat, but Merlin didn't care about that.

He yanked Gwen away from an epic spatula showdown with Elyan over the garlic bread and hauled her into the hallway right outside the kitchen.

"There's _six_ place settings," Merlin hissed. "Are you setting me up again?"

"Why, Merlin, why would you even think that?" Gwen asked, and Merlin held up his hands.

"No, no, you don't get to pull the innocent here, Gwen. Oh, God. It's not Edwin, is it?. Please say it's not him. He gives me the creeps --"

Except for this week -- which was bordering on _ridiculous_ considering the volume of work that Merlin and Will had on their plates right now -- Merlin couldn't turn around at the hospital after a drop-off or a pick-up without Edwin appearing out of nowhere. Merlin would startle, and Edwin would reach out to steady him -- to bloody _fondle_ \-- under the pretext of stopping Merlin from falling to the floor or crashing in whatever was nearest. He always wanted to have a hot shower and scrub a layer of skin from his body afterward.

"It's not Edwin, I promise," Gwen said.

"Ah ha! But it _is_ someone. I knew it. You're out to do my head in, I'm sure of it --"

The doorbell rang. Merlin stared at the door for a long time before turning away and stalking through the flat.

"Where are you going?"

"Fire escape."

"Merlin!"

Merlin winced. Gwen's hands were on her hips, and the stern look on her face was somewhere between _after the week I've had I'm not in the mood to put up with any shite_ and _if you leave I will hunt you down and drag you back and set you up with Gilli_. Merlin twitched involuntarily. Gilli was even _worse_ than Edwin. Merlin's shoulders slumped in defeat. "Why do you keep doing this to me? I'm just not interested in a relationship --"

"He's a lovely, lovely man," Gwen said, a mean twinkle in her eye. "You might even be surprised by how much you're going to like him."

"An evening of awkward conversation with someone I don't know who probably thinks he'll get in my pants by the end of the evening? Oh, yeah, I can see myself liking him already --" Merlin raised his brows. "Just like I liked Cenred. Remember Cenred?"

"I said I was sorry! How many more times am I going to have to apologize for Cenred?" Gwen asked, rolling her eyes. The doorbell rang again.

"I'll get it," Elyan said.

"Don't you _dare_ ," Gwen said, and Elyan, being far more afraid of his sister than he ought, took a step back behind Lance. Gwen gave Merlin a sweet, encouraging smile -- he didn't trust that smile one bit -- and took his arm in a vice grip that crunched his bones together. "Why don't you get the door, Merlin?"

"I hate you so much right now," Merlin muttered. He stopped in front of the door and glanced over his shoulder to see Gwen give him a smug, _go ahead and open it_ gesture. He mocked it right back at her, until she smirked and went into the kitchen to help Lance defend the pie from her brother.

Merlin heaved a heavy breath and debated yanking it open, pushing his way past whoever was on the other side, and legging it to safety. As tempting as that was, he knew that Gwen would hurt him. A lot.

The doorbell rang a third time. 

"Merlin!" Gwen said, her voice high and sharp, and if Merlin wasn't mistaken, there was a growl in her tone, too.

"I got it, I got it," Merlin said, and opened the door.

He froze.

Arthur was in front of him, unfairly gorgeous in dark jeans, a button-down red shirt that was fitted to his wide shoulders, a leather jacket tucked under his arm. He had a small square package in one hand and a brown paper bag wrapped around something suspiciously shaped like a wine bottle under the other. His expression had turned from worried concern to delight in an instant, and _goddamn it_ , but the deep red of Arthur's shirt brought out the blue of his eyes.

"Arthur, wha --" Merlin snapped out of it in time to step outside the flat, pushing Arthur into the corridor, yanking the door shut behind him. "What are you doing here?"

Arthur gave Merlin a half-amused look and inclined his head ever-so-slightly, and that must have been deliberately done, because Merlin's eyes went right for the expanse of skin and muscle that was exposed around his throat and chest when his shirt opened up just a tiny bit. "I'm your plus one."

"No, no, you're not. You didn't even _call_ \--"

"I had problems with the number that you gave me," Arthur said, and Merlin groaned.

"Of course, yeah. I should've thought. The switchboard's gotten completely slammed with calls. I'm sorry about that, but --" Merlin's relief that Arthur hadn't been avoiding him was short-lived as his brain hurried to catch up with the situation. He narrowed his eyes. "How are you _here_? I didn't give you the address --"

"Oh." Arthur smiled. "I asked Gwen and Lance."

"You -- you asked Gwen and Lance. Of course you did. That should be obvious, except _I never told you about them_ \--" Merlin stuttered to a stop. "You're a stalker, aren't you? You've been stalking me. Gwen didn't invite you. She invited someone else, and you told him he was at the wrong address and you stuffed him in the boot of your car and took his place, _didn't you_ \--"

Arthur's growing smile -- which was wavering a tiny little bit with confusion -- wasn't reassuring in the least.

The door to the flat opened behind Merlin, and Merlin cut himself off before his rant got out of hand. He turned around wildly and stood in front of Arthur as if to hide that he was even there.

"Arthur, you made it," Gwen said, her tone perfectly sweet and civil, but the look she was giving Merlin was anything but. "Why don't you two come inside? Dinner's nearly ready, but if we don't sit down, Elyan is going to eat all of the bread."

"You made enough bread to feed a small village. I don't think anyone will miss a loaf," Elyan said from somewhere in the kitchen.

"Oi, that's not bread. It's pie. Stay away from the pie. There is never enough pie," Lance said, and there was a firm _twack_ followed by an indignant _OW_.

Gwen herded them both inside. "I'll take your coat, Arthur."

"Actually, could you -- I brought… well, I didn't know what to bring, so I brought a bit of everything. Some wine -- I hope red is all right? And dessert --"

Gwen's eyes widened and she made a tiny little gasp of surprise before taking the box that Arthur offered. "You didn't have to," she said, but there was a hint of _I'm really glad you did_ in her voice. She peeked inside and gasped again. "Where did you find these? I love these."

"Just a little shop," Arthur said vaguely, giving Merlin a sidelong look that he couldn't interpret, but that must mean something. Merlin narrowed his eyes suspiciously and reached over Gwen's shoulder for a look.

The first thing he noticed was the sticker on the box -- a shiny gold stamp in an oval with _Chez Renaud_. The name of the bakery tugged at Merlin's memory, but his brain short-circuited when he saw what was inside.

Chocolate éclairs.

Chocolate. Éclairs.

Suddenly, _Chez Renaud_ struck him with a sledgehammer blow, because --

_"So there's this little shop in Paris, in Montmartre, and mind, I'll probably never find it again, because I only went there once, and I wasn't paying attention to where we were going. I mean, it's a little humiliating to have to ask for a lift after your plane crashes just outside of Paris, you know? Not my fault the motor stalled on me, but that's not the point," Merlin said. He nuzzled that spot under Arthur's jaw, right under his ear, and smiled in self-satisfaction when he heard Arthur moan._

_"I'm waiting around for someone else to take me the rest of the way when I get hit in the nose by manna from Heaven. I follow the smell all the way to this tiny family bakery -- there wasn't even a sign over the door, just a little cardboard mock-up that looked like a four-year old drew it, or something. It said_ Chez Renaud _, except with an S instead of a C, and it was really cute. I walked in and the owner's this gruff little man, broad shoulders and big arms from all the kneading he does, I guess. I don't even get a chance to ask him what he's just taken out of the oven when he shoves this box at me and barks,_ Un Franc _."_

 _Arthur shifted under Merlin; there was a feat of athleticism that landed Merlin onto his back with Arthur on top, and Arthur smothered what Merlin had been about to say with a long, languid kiss that left Merlin far more boneless than the rough fuck just a half hour before._

_"What was in the box?" Arthur asked, moving from Merlin's lips to the crook of his neck, and Merlin gulped in air because Arthur had stolen his breath._

_"Chocolate éclairs. Six of them. I took one bite, and that was it, I was done for. But by the time I'd come to my senses and realized I'd better marry this man before someone else snaps him up and ruins him for baking, I was already half across Montmartre, hurrying for my lift to the airfield, and I had nothing to show for it. Not even one measly crumb. I'd eaten all of it and hadn't even realized. I was bereft, I was -- ohh, do that again --"_

"You remembered," Merlin blurted out.

There was a quirk of a smile on Arthur's lips, a shy dip of his chin.

"Holy shite," Merlin said, blinking, because if the mere fact that Arthur had remembered nearly seventy years later wasn't enough, Arthur had _found_ the mysterious little bakery that Merlin, despite several attempts, could never find again, and, most importantly, if he remembered that tiny detail, it meant that he had been thinking about Merlin all this time. 

Arthur glanced up, and a bit of red touched his cheeks as if he knew exactly what Merlin was thinking.

And Merlin could only say, "Holy shite," again. He took a step close to Arthur. He wanted to kiss this man. He wanted to take him home and --

"Eat first, snog later," Gwen said, turning away, but not before she paused to give Merlin another significant look and a raised brow. She mouthed, _He's a keeper_.

Merlin gave Arthur a small smile and took his coat, hanging it up in the closet.

There were quick introductions around the table, handshakes over the salad, a free-flowing pour of wine, and a silence peppered with occasional bits of conversation as everyone tucked into their food. Arthur's arm brushed against Merlin's so many times, that Merlin wasn't sure how he hadn't become too distracted to eat; he retaliated by bumping his leg against Arthur's until, toward the end, Arthur reached under the table under the pretext of straightening his napkin and kept Merlin's leg from jerking away with a solid squeeze.

"I heard that one of the doctors got bitten by one of the assault victims," Mithian said. "Is he all right?"

"Edwin? Yeah, he's all right," Lance said, but Gwen's expression was dubious.

"Oh, it was Edwin?" Merlin asked.

"Couldn't happen to a nicer bloke," Elyan said with a roll of his eyes.

"His arm didn't look good when I saw the night nurse change his dressing," Gwen said. "You know, infected and everything--"

"The human mouth is dirtier than a dog's, you know," Elyan supplied.

"Yes, thank you for that enlightening bit of useless trivia. Eat your lasagne," Gwen said. "It's just, we can't afford to be down a doctor. Not with all these attacks."

"What made the patient bite Edwin?" Merlin asked. 

"Couldn't have been Edwin's fantastic bedside manner," Elyan said, and Mithian elbowed him, hard.

The smirk competed with a frown, and the frown won out when Merlin said, "I haven't had anyone try to bite me. Although, honestly, they're usually unconscious when we get to them --"

"Panic, most likely," Mithian said. "The patients -- those who come out of it, anyway -- they've all been pretty agitated when they woke up. Some of the doctors called in a psychologist for a consult after the police couldn't get a straight answer from any of them. I overheard the psychologist afterward, said that it might be a while before they can get anything useful. PTSD and trauma and shock and amnesia and catatonia and yadda yadda yadda, it doesn't change the fact that --"

"Yadda yadda yadda?" Elyan gave Mithian a measuring look. "Really? That's the best you can come up with?"

"It's a technical term," Mithian said, and continued as if she had never been interrupted. "These people were _mauled_. The muscle damage is pretty deep. Sometimes the muscle is completely torn out. The cuts where the attackers latched on aren't clean, it's like they're using blunt tools or something, not anything sharp like the hooks the trash mags are saying. And the rest of it? Like tearing through fabric and skin and ligaments and bone, that's just gruesome. Who would do that? And don't tell me, _someone who's gone psychotic_ , because honestly --"

"A guy hopped up on LSD, maybe?" Elyan asked. "Could that do it do it?"

"Probably," Lance said.

"I watched a guy tear through nylon gurney straps and blow out the back of an ambulance, taking a door with him, once," Merlin said, nodding. "Definitely could happen."

"I'd say it was an animal," Mithian said. She shrugged her shoulders at the silence around the table. "What, don't tell me you didn't think of that yourselves. When wild animals hunt --"

"They go for vulnerable parts," Merlin said, shaking his head. "The throat or the stomach. They hamstring them to try to bring them down if they're chasing them, or they cut the spine if they're coming from above."

Elyan shot Merlin a raised brow. "Well, well, well, look who's a big game hunter, all hip with the cool things that the predators are doing these days."

"I didn't know you hunted," Gwen said.

"I --" Merlin mumbled something under his breath and ducked his eyes and shrugged, embarrassed. There _had_ been a time once or twice when he'd retreated from civilization -- it had all been too much to take at some points -- and had lived off the land to survive. But he couldn't tell his friends that --

Arthur shifted in his seat and put a hand on Merlin's back in a completely casual gesture that meant absolutely nothing at all, but was entirely reassuring. 

Merlin glanced at him and gave him a wan smile. Well, at least there was _someone_ that he could talk to about it. There were a lot of things that they needed to talk about, though. In private.

Gwen must have caught Merlin's discomfort, because she looked at Arthur and squeaked a little, inhuman sound.

"Oh, God! I'm so sorry!" Gwen gave Arthur a mortified look. "I should have made everyone swear no shop talk. We can get pretty grisly --"

Arthur raised a hand and shrugged. "It's all right. I'm not easily shocked or bothered."

"Still, this isn't exactly dinner conversation for normal people. I mean, not that we're not normal. Or that you. Well. By normal, I mean... oh, never mind what I mean," Gwen said, frowning at everyone, including Lance. "You should've stopped them."

"I don't think anyone could've stopped Mithian once she got some momentum," Lance said in apology. "I wasn't going to stand in the way.

"I really don't mind," Arthur said. He drew his hand from Merlin's back after another gentle rub, and reached for the garlic bread, offering the basket to Merlin first. "I find it… interesting."

"Interesting's not the word," Elyan said, waving in the air with his fork as he spoke, splattering sauce everywhere. "Gruesome. Disgusting. Gut-wrenching. Morbid. Macabre --"

Mithian clapped. "Congratulations. I see you've found your thesaurus."

Elyan elbowed Mithian and Gwen stifled a chortle.

" _Interesting_ ," Arthur said again, and there was a smile on his lips. "These are the sort of details that most people don't usually hear. And, to be quite honest with you, it's definitely not the worst conversation I've ever had with someone."

"No, that would be Merlin, I think. He has the worst pick-up lines --" Gwen took Elyan's plate away. "Oi!"

"If you can't be _nice_ \--"

Merlin propped his elbow on the table and covered his face with his hand. 

"Actually, I thought Merlin's pick-up line was quite charming," Arthur said, his voice so soft that Merlin almost didn't hear it, and so gentle that it silenced the group. Merlin turned his head and looked at Arthur through the crack of his fingers. Arthur took Merlin's hand away from his face. "Don't worry. I'm not going to tell them what you said."

"Thank God for that, then," Merlin said, but his fingers tightened around Arthur's hand, and Arthur squeezed back before drawing his hand away rather suddenly. Merlin covered up his frown with a half-laugh and an embarrassed, "I think I was a little drunk at the time."

"Oh, you've got to tell us now, mate," Lance said with a grin.

"No," Arthur said, after a worrying moment of consideration. "I'm going to save it for a special occasion and maximize the humiliation potential."

Gwen laughed then, and said, "I like you, Arthur."

Merlin rolled his eyes and nudged Arthur's leg.

"So, Arthur," Gwen said, and Merlin winced at her tone -- it was her twenty questions voice -- "I know what everyone else here does. I'm a trauma specialist, Lance is a nurse, Merlin's a paramedic, Elyan's doing his research post-doc at the hospital, and Mithian supports my brother's lazy arse. She's a surgeon. What do you do, Arthur?"

Merlin glanced at Arthur, curious. He knew absolutely nothing about Arthur -- not even what he had been doing in that tavern in France's backwoods during the Second World War, or where he'd gone afterward. All that he knew was that, somehow, Arthur had survived the last seventy years on his own, and without aging a single day.

Arthur hesitated, smiled faintly in disguised consideration, as if trying to decide how to answer. He stared down at his plate before looking up to admit, "I'm an investigator."

"Like a copper?" Elyan asked.

"In a way, I suppose," Arthur said. "A private investigator, actually. I specialize in stolen property, burglary, recovery, missing persons. That sort of thing."

He waved a dismissive and distracting hand in the air before reaching for his wineglass, taking a sip. Merlin eyed him for a long time before deciding that it made sense for Arthur to find a different way of tracking Merlin down when Elena's switchboard got bombarded with calls, and it certainly explained how he'd found _Chez Renaud_ when Merlin couldn't, even after having spent weeks wandering through every street and alley in Montmartre after the war. 

Gwen made a small, hmm-mming sound and asked, "Does that mean that you have friends in the police?"

Merlin groaned. "And I keep telling you, Gwen, they're keeping mum. Percy won't tell me anything and it doesn't matter how much cleavage that Elena shows Gwaine -- there's a solid lid on this thing --"

Arthur's hand returned to Merlin's back, and Merlin stumbled to a quiet grumble. "Even if I knew anything, I'm afraid that it's all speculation right now. I don't think even the police know who or what they're after. From what I understand, there simply hasn't been enough evidence to narrow down the list of suspects."

Merlin thought that Arthur's frown was far more intense than it should be. "It sounds like you've been looking into it," he said quietly.

"Concerned citizen," Arthur said, shrugging his shoulder.

"Fine line between _concerned citizen_ and _masked vigilante_ ," Elyan said. "For example, Batman. Are you Batman?"

"Um. No?" Arthur's brows pinched, and he looked as if he'd been caught in a lie. Everyone chuckled, even Arthur, though Merlin thought Arthur hadn't gotten the joke.

"I imagine Arthur looks good in Lycra," Gwen said, raising an eyebrow. Merlin blushed and shook his head. 

Lance scowled at Gwen, but it was amused and self-indulging. Arthur looked confused, and Elyan said, "I don't care if they look good in Lycra. No self-respecting man _should be_ in Lycra."

"Said the man who wore a Spiderman costume last year --" Mithian's revelation died at the end of a very sharp elbow. Merlin snickered.

"I have no idea what he's talking about," Elyan said, and sipped his wine.

It was wine that went down his shirt a moment later when they were all startled by the sound of gunfire right outside the building. Merlin shouted " _Get down_." Arthur ignored him and went to the big windows in the sitting room and pulled the blinds shut. Merlin went for the light switches and turned them all off before approaching Arthur at a crouch.

He took Arthur's wrist and tried to tug him to safety, but Arthur wasn't moving, so Merlin rose to his feet. Arthur moved his arm to keep Merlin behind him.

Merlin tightened his hold around Arthur's wrist. He looked at Arthur sharply when he realized that Arthur's heart rate hadn't gone up _one bit_. Arthur pulled the blinds open a fraction of an inch to peer out. The gunfire continued, louder now, and it was so bright in the street below that Merlin could see the flashes of muzzle fire.

"What's going on?" Gwen asked shakily. Mithian and Elyan crawled closer.

"Stay down," Merlin snapped.

If there was something that Merlin didn't miss about any of the wars he'd ever fought in, it was the sound of gunfire and the way that seconds passed in long, interminable minutes. Even a short firefight could feel like hours, because the adrenaline had this uncanny side effect of dilating time. But soon, very soon, the gunfire receded.

And worse, there were no police sirens.

"What the hell was that?" Lance asked. 

"Maybe there's something on the news?" Elyan was already scrambling for the sofa and the remote for the telly.

"I can't get through to 999," Gwen said, the backlight of her phone turning her complexion ghostly pale.

The light from the telly flickered until Elyan found a news station -- which wasn't hard considering every local station had been pre-empted and there was an identical _Breaking News_ logo in the background, behind the anchor.

"… broke out first in Chelsea but has since spread throughout lower London and is moving north. Police in full riot gear are on the streets right now attempting to contain the crowds. The violence has escalated to unprecedented levels --"

The newscast snapped to live feed that bobbed nauseatingly, and it was hard to make out the details beyond the fact that the cameraman looked to be _running for his life_. The breathless voice of the reporter was somewhere in the background, difficult to make out, but the anchor continued to talk. 

"… firebombing and looting. Officials have not announced the motives or demands of this group -- if it's indeed a terrorist group, since no one has stepped forward to date to claim credit --"

The anchor's voice faded out and the reporter's frantic "-- _oh my -- bugger me sideways! -- did you see that? Did you see that? That guy just tore the copper's arm from his body --_ "

The image abruptly switched, and the anchor, pale-faced but stoic, was tapping his papers on the desk. "The Metropolitan Police Services have requested that all citizens in the affected areas --"

A ticker-tape scroll on the bottom of the screen named off Richmond, Hammersmith, Fulham, Kensington, Chelsea, Wandsworth, Lambeth and Camden, the anchor reciting them in chorus.

"-- to remain in the safety of their homes, and to follow the safety protocols --"

Merlin glanced around the room. Every face was stricken and tense with fear -- except for Arthur. He was frowning unhappily.

"… there has been a request that the residents in neighbouring boroughs follow the same protocols and remain alert. If you observe signs that the violence has spread --"

Arthur sidled aside until he was next to Merlin, his body heat searing. The whisper in Merlin's ear was even more so, and Merlin had to focus on the words rather than the feeling of warm breath against his skin.

"Let me take you home."

 

****

 

**

**ooOOoo**

**

 

****

It had taken some convincing before Gwen let either of them leave the safety of the flat, and that was only after Merlin insisted that they would be fine, that they'd be careful, that they would keep an eye out for danger, and, finally, "For God's sake, Gwen. Arthur's a private investigator. If anyone knows how to sneak around and not be seen, it's _him_."

They were halfway to the train station when Merlin stumbled to a stop and doubled back.

"What is it?" Alarm rang through Arthur and he looked around, extending his senses. He could feel every living creature within five kilometres, right down to the cockroaches skittering in the basement of a nearby apartment building. There were two small groups of people, and they were coming in their direction. The sooner they got to the relative safety of the train --

"The _éclairs_! Do you know how long I've been looking for them? I'm not leaving them behind now. I can practically taste them --"

Arthur couldn't help it. He laughed. He also put a firm hand on Merlin's back, his touch muffled by the fabric between them, and forced Merlin to leave the sweets behind. "I'll get you some more."

"But --"

"It's more important that I get you away from the violence. It's not safe here," Arthur said. He didn't remove his hand from the small of Merlin's back. He twitched a little until he remembered that it was all right to touch Merlin. That nothing would happen.

Arthur hadn't meant to touch Merlin anywhere as much as he had that evening, but despite the physical contact, either through clothing or directly skin-to-skin, Merlin's _life_ hadn't wavered. It should have, but it didn't. He was as alive as he had ever been, apparently immune to Arthur's touch.

It was unbelievable to Arthur. And amazing. And incredible. He had grown bolder and bolder over dinner, even going so far as to rest his hand on Merlin's arm, once, though he had quickly drawn away, terrified that he was draining Merlin of years and years of his life. When that proved not to be true, Arthur reached out more and more, and now --

Now, he was addicted. He reached for Merlin -- touched him, grabbed him, pulled him close, found an excuse to flick an imaginary piece of lint from his shoulder -- as often as he could.

An immunity to death was unthinkable. Arthur should feel personally affronted and do whatever he could to rectify the slight against his half-divinity, but he couldn't find it in him to be anything else but elated.

Merlin came to a stop a second time, and Arthur huffed a breath. "What now?"

"I think it's pretty obvious that neither of us have a fear of dying, because we've proved otherwise," Merlin said, his voice hushed. "You don't have to shove me around. I'll be fine, whatever it is --"

Arthur stepped close to Merlin, taking over his personal space. "You should have _died_ that night, Merlin. I don't know how or why you're alive, but you were right. I've been alone for a long time, and I'm not going to lose you."

"You're not --" Despite the overhead streetlight shadowing Merlin's features, it was easy to see that he was changing gears. "Wait. Why should I have died that night?"

The two groups that Arthur had sensed earlier were even closer now; they were wasting time standing here. "I'll explain later --"

"No. Now," Merlin said, crossing his arms. "Did you have something to do with my squad? They all died that night, you know. Nobody knew why."

"Merlin --" 

"I couldn't figure out why they died. They should've been _fine_. They survived the bloody dogfight, I'd made sure of it --"

Arthur frowned. "What do you mean, you made sure of it?"

"I made sure of it! I can --" Merlin flailed his arms in the air in a gesture that Arthur was certain meant something important and significant, but he couldn't, for the life of him, fathom what it was. "I saved them, all right? I _saved_ them, and they died, and do you know how much shite I was in afterward? They thought I'd done it, because I was the only one who walked away from that tavern that night --"

"What do you mean, you saved them? How? You were outnumbered, outgunned, and running low on ammunition. _None of you_ should have survived the dogfight, Merlin! When the squad survived, it threw the balance out of whack, and I had to take care of it --"

Arthur stopped himself. Merlin stared at him with widening eyes.

"Oh my God. You _did_ kill them."

"I… I didn't kill them. I did my job. I restored the way things were supposed to be --"

"You killed them," Merlin said again. He took a confused step away from Arthur. The distance between them was a stab in Arthur's chest. "You killed them. You killed _all_ of them. Did you kill me, too?"

Arthur waved a hand up and down to indicate Merlin. "Obviously not."

"No, you did --" Merlin paced the length of the streetlight's yellow cast on the sidewalk twice before stopping in front of Arthur. "That explains a lot."

It was all very cryptic, and Arthur tilted his head, trying to understand. "What?"

"I thought you were like me, but you're not, are you? Not even close. What are you, Arthur?"

The two groups that were coming their way had inexplicably grown in size. They were also running and shouting and screaming, and Arthur could hear them now. He took Merlin's arm; Merlin wrenched it away. "Can we talk about this later?"

"Arthur --"

"I mean it, Merlin. I need to get you somewhere safe, because in two minutes, this place is going to be so far from safe, people are going to _die_. You might die --"

"I won't --" Merlin began, but he turned around, finally hearing the distant chaos heading their way. "Bollocks. All right. You owe me an explanation --"

"I will tell you everything you want to know, just -- _come on_ ," Arthur said, taking Merlin's hand. He pulled him into a run toward the station.

They stopped at the entrance, breathless and panting, and paused to turn and look. Merlin's gasp of surprise was less on the self-preservation _holy shite let's get out of here_ side and more of the interested _wow, that's a lot of people_ sort than Arthur liked, because he was oblivious to the fact that these people were frantic, terrified, and carrying weapons. Arthur grabbed Merlin's arm and dragged him up the stairs to the platform; up there, they could hear the shouts as the two groups of people met in the middle.

They were shouting, but not fighting. Arthur stopped Merlin from going back to find out what was going on.

"But they're not --"

"They're running from something," Arthur said, lowering his head, half-closing his eyes to concentrate. He could feel the mortals out on the street. He could sense those who were meant to die soon and those who wouldn't see their graves for decades. But he couldn't feel the object of their fear until he forced himself to look for something else, something _wrong_ , something like the creature that had attacked Thornbull's corpse and had fed from it.

Arthur was a Reaper; he had no use for self-preservation instincts. He wasn't even certain that he had any. But now, at right this instant, it hit him in full force, and he was feeling exactly the thing that Merlin should be feeling, and that was, _holy shite let's get out of here right fucking now_.

There were so many of them. So _many_.

Where did they come from? Why didn't Arthur know about this massive horde?

His blood ran cold.

He pulled Merlin away from the train platform and toward the stairs they had just climbed; the reverberating stomp of footsteps coming up forced them to retreat. He ignored Merlin's frantic questions -- "What's going on, what is it, what --" -- and pulled Merlin back the other way. There was a different exit, they would try that one --

He yanked Merlin to a stop and hurriedly backtracked when he saw jerky, staggering movement from the train tunnel's mouth. The swirl of heat condensing in the cool night air played tricks with the eye, but he thought he saw something _gleam_.

And shift.

And move.

There was a hush louder than the crowd storming onto the platform, louder than the gunfire that had begun somewhere off in the distance. It was the sound of menace, sickening and indistinct. It was the feel of terror rousing goose flesh on the skin and hackles on the back of the neck.

Even Merlin stopped complaining and asking questions, falling unnaturally silent. He moved close to Arthur, grasping him as tightly as Arthur held Merlin.

A clawed hand, five-fingered like a man's, attached to a long, thin limb appeared out of the darkness and scratched the platform until it had purchase.

Arthur stared at it. 

It was skeleton-thin and covered in the rot of decaying flesh and the black of dried blood.

Arthur took a step away. Merlin stumbled after him.

A head -- a human head -- came into the light. It was hairless and the skin hung from the skull in tattered strands; there was enough of a face to see that it had been human, once. Its eyes were hollow in deep sockets and the sun-bleached white of bone, slick with mucous slime as black and as sparkling as tarry stars.

Arthur, Merlin, the crowd of people behind them -- everything stilled, paralyzed.

It hauled itself onto the platform. It crouched down on all fours like an animal before slowly drawing itself to its full height. Clothing hung in tatters around shoulders that looked as solid as a rugby player's, but there was a hollow in its chest where something had torn out half its torso, and its shoulders were slumped forward, one higher than the other.

Arthur pulled Merlin back.

The creature snuffled the air with a nose that was nothing else but two smeared bloody holes in the middle of its face. It tilted its head comically.

It smiled.

It smiled with human teeth that were stained yellow with the metallic smear of blood. 

It took a step forward.

Arthur moved away, keeping Merlin at his side.

There was a skitter of sound behind the creature, and a second head appeared in the gloom, climbing out from the train tunnel.

A piercing scream from the platform's entrance shattered the crowd's paralysis. Arthur knew that scream; it was the scream of someone dying a sick, violent death. A tremor of panic rippled through the crowd and they pushed Arthur and Merlin toward the creature in their haste to get away.

Someone fired their gun. Someone else fired, too. More guns went off in a cascade of desperation.

Arthur clamped an iron grip around Merlin's wrist and looked around frantically. He spotted a door with a faded _SERVICE_ sign at the end of the platform, just past the creatures, just shy of the second exit. They headed there, dodging the rush of people running past them, staying clear of the second and third and _fourth_ and _fifth_ creature as they climbed the platform.

Arthur was jerked to a sudden stop. Merlin was resisting, Merlin was --

Arthur glanced behind him to see Merlin on his knees, his eyes glazed over in pain, his mouth open in an aborted cry that Arthur hadn't even heard over the tumult and the chaos. Merlin's free hand was on his chest, and he looked down at himself, at his hand.

It came away wet with blood.

He was shot.

Arthur heard it. He felt the recoil. The thread of Merlin's life snapped in two.

"Merlin. No. No. _NO!_ " Arthur knelt and caught Merlin before his body could slump onto the platform. He was jarred and knocked by the stampede of people trying to get away, and he hissed in pain when something hard and heavy hit him in the head. He shook his head to clear it and grabbed Merlin, sliding an arm under his shoulders and the other under his legs. Arthur hefted Merlin up into his arms.

Nothing mattered anymore.

Not the people fleeing for their lives. Not the people dying before their time. Not the creatures who were dead and outside Arthur's purview. Not the creatures who were _withering_ the life of others by feeding on them.

No one had seen a Reaper in almost a thousand years. No one had seen a Reaper until now.

The crowd parted from around Arthur. People ran toward the creatures to get away from _him_. Arthur walked purposefully toward the door and kicked it open.

He slammed it shut behind him and sank to the floor, Merlin in his arms.

The service corridor was a long, narrow tunnel with electrical panels and long lines of pipes along the walls cast aglow by flickering blue fluorescent lighting. Power hummed through those lines and hiccupped with occasional crackles. The cacophony from the platform was muted to a frantic chitter of sound.

They were alone, isolated, with no one to bother them.

And Merlin was dead.

Arthur had never felt so helpless. There had always been something that he could do. He had defended himself against over-ambitious sorcerers who had thought to control him to extend their own lives. He had survived any number of wars in the kingdom of the Gods by matter of skill and tactics. He was _feared_ by other demi-Gods who were unsure of their own divinity and immortality -- and they had reason to.

He could hunt down his victims to the end of the earth. He could end their lives with a touch. He could make people see whatever they wanted to see when they looked at him. He was merciful when mercy was kind, and cruel and unforgiving when it was deserved. He could cut the thread of life, he could ensure that there was no redemption or resurrection, he could nudge a soul toward rebirth or the deepest pit of Hell however he saw fit.

He could not bring back the dead. He could not make a corpse draw breath. 

He would never drown in Merlin's kisses again.

Arthur's face was wet. His eyes burned. His chest hurt. Something was making quiet, whimpering sounds, and it was some time before he realized that those sounds were coming from _him_. That he was weeping.

Grieving.

It was an awful feeling. How did mortals endure it?

Now, he understood why mortals cursed their Gods and cursed Fate when their loved ones reached the end of their thread of life and died. Now, he understood why mortals shuddered sobs by another's deathbeds. Now, he knew the hollow and the pain and the heartache of loss.

Merlin's body was slack, limp, warm. He could have been asleep except his heart didn't beat and he didn't take a breath and there was blood all down his front and back. 

Arthur touched Merlin's cheek. He traced the line of Merlin's cheekbone to the hinge just over his ear. He smoothed down the sunken cheek and let his fingers rest on Merlin's jaw. He brushed the unruly hair from where it was plastered on his forehead, moving them strand by strand.

Merlin's lips were bloodless and pale. His skin had flushed of colour. His eyes were shut.

Merlin was dead.

Arthur wished that he could die, too.

The rest of the world didn't exist for him. He didn't know what was happening outside the service door. Something had banged against it once, twice, three times, and the sound had retreated and faded. Beyond that single interruption, Arthur didn't know what was happening. He didn't care.

He never did care much about the going-ons in a mortal world, but now he cared even _less_. If it was in his power to do so, he would damn the circumstances that had brought him Merlin a second time, only to take him away.

Time passed, but he wasn't aware of its passing. It was as if it had frozen for him. As if it didn't exist.

He couldn't think. He couldn't breathe. 

"Merlin," he whispered, his voice like shattered glass. He touched Merlin's face again and again. He adjusted Merlin's body against his. He ignored the blood that streaked down his front and sides. He ignored the coolness settling on Merlin's body.

A whoosh of a train and a clatter of brakes made the walls vibrate. A few minutes later, the train moved on.

"Why didn't you listen to me, Merlin?" Arthur said. His tone was fragile, fuelled with anger he didn't really feel. "Why didn't you hurry? Why did you have to stop and ask questions? Couldn't you just have waited?"

This was his fault. He could have insisted that Merlin stay at his friends' flat for the night, and Merlin would have been safe. Alive. But Arthur was selfish, and he hadn't wanted to share Merlin for a moment longer. He had wanted to take Merlin home. He had wanted to take up where they had left off after that night nearly seventy years ago.

He could have been with Merlin all this time if only he had known.

"I fell in love with you that night," Arthur whispered. "I didn't realize I had until I saw you again. You saw _me_ , Merlin. I didn't want to leave. I stayed as long as I could. But everyone was waking up and the sun was rising and they would have found the others soon and they would have come looking for you."

He brushed his fingers over Merlin's face again.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." Arthur pressed a kiss to Merlin's forehead. "I love you. I love you. I should have said."

Arthur didn't know what to do. Logically, he knew that he should go and find out what was happening, what those creatures were, why they were outside of the sphere of his dominion over life and death. He should hunt them down, find a way to kill them, and restore the balance -- a balance he could already feel in the pit of his soul to be precariously tilted on the edge

But he didn't want to leave Merlin alone. He didn't want to leave, period. He couldn't leave.

This was Merlin.

He'd left him once. He couldn't leave him again.

Arthur gathered Merlin's body in his arms. He got to his feet. He leaned against the door behind him.

He could sense the bodies on the platform on the other side of the door. He could feel the _withered_ strands of life in a way that he couldn't before, a blight upon the balance. He could hear the slurp and chew, the sluicing tear and smacking lips, the guttural groans and moaning satisfaction as the creatures fed.

Arthur walked down the corridor, taking Merlin away from there. He would return when he had set Merlin's body somewhere safe, he would return for the creatures, and he would destroy them all.

The lights flickered as he walked. The power pulsing through the pipes rumbled in a deafening hum.

The air vibrated.

One by one, the bulbs shattered and the blue florescent glow faded. The shadows encroached behind him, menacing, a predator bearing down upon its prey.

Arthur turned to watch the darkness come. A click behind him made him turn around, and he saw that the corridor was darkening at the other end, too, and that the darkness was coming toward him.

The hair rose on the back of his neck.

The faint electrical murmur rose to a crescendo and the junction boxes burst in a shower of bright white sparks, one after another, starting from the furthest and working its way toward the middle. Arthur set Merlin down on the floor and covered his body to protect him from the lightning storm that flared from the walls, licking at the ceiling, arcing toward the ground.

Something was coming. 

Arthur didn't know what it was.

It felt like nothing that Arthur had ever encountered before. It wasn't alive. It wasn't dead. It was --

It shivered around Arthur in an embrace. It glided over his skin with a lover's touch. It --

Merlin gasped for air.

He flailed under Arthur, fingers scratching for purchase, a drowning man trying to rise to the surface.

Arthur scrambled backward, hitting the wall hard.

The lights went out.

The flashes of lightning painted a juddering picture of movement, of limbs jerking in every direction, of a spine curving, of a body curling onto itself.

Everything went dark.

A distant junction box fizzled and sparked and sputtered.

One by one, orange emergency lights turned on, and Arthur watched in growing horror as Merlin moved from his fetal pose, stretching out into an awkward recovery position.

Merlin couldn't be one of them. He couldn't have turned into one of the creatures. He couldn't be --

Arthur didn't want to look. But he did.

He'd already seen it. He'd felt it. The thread of Merlin's life hadn't withered. It had been _cut_ , destroyed, eradicated --

But now that he looked at it again, the thread of Merlin's life was beautifully, wonderfully, _inexplicably_ whole.

"Merlin?" Arthur crawled on his hands and knees until he reached Merlin, brushing his hand. Merlin's fingers closed around his wrist with surprising strength.

"Fuck," Merlin whispered. Then, louder, " _Fuck._ "

He rolled onto his back, a hand on his chest.

"Seven," he moaned. " _Seven fucking times._ God. I _hate_ getting shot."

Merlin's hand patted over his bloodied shirt until his fingers found the hole; he felt around before unbuttoning it and peering down at himself for a better look. His chest was streaked with blood except where Merlin rubbed it clean.

There was no bullet wound.

Merlin's eyes snapped up as if realizing that Arthur was there. He swallowed hard, but his voice was thick when he said, "I was trying to tell you --"

The first thing to crowd Arthur's thoughts wasn't _how did you_ or _why are you_.

It was _Thank God._

He surged toward Merlin and kissed him.

 

****

 

**

**ooOOoo**

**

 

****

Arthur stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling window of Merlin's loft. It had a view overlooking the city, but Merlin couldn't take his eyes from Arthur.

There were times when the lights in the distance -- streetlights, storefront lights, headlights of passing cars and lorries -- made Merlin think of the firelight of campsites and hearths that had burned here, in this very place, hundreds upon hundreds of years ago. 

Merlin remembered another time when he stood next to a Druid Chieftain upon a mound, and they had looked off into the distance at the blink of torchlight weaving through the distant forest. It was a sign that the enemy had come; a warning to prepare for battle, the beginning of a psychological assault to chip at morale and strength.

Here and now, the city was going dark, block by block, borough by borough. There had been a time when the darkness would have been comforting to those on the brink of war, where it was the _light_ that heralded danger and doom. But now, in the modern age, where not a single man nor woman had known true darkness or its comfort, when they lived in the light, the encroaching pitch of night brought with it nothing but terror.

Merlin grunted and rolled off the couch. He put a hand on his chest and tested the steadiness of his legs before going to stand at the window with Arthur.

Arthur didn't turn to look at him, but he reached out and wrapped an arm around Merlin's waist, tugging him close and steadying him.

Neither of them spoke.

Arthur hadn't asked any questions after Merlin woke up from this latest death, and Merlin wasn't certain if he should be relieved or concerned. Arthur, it seemed, had been so intent on keeping Merlin safe that he had shouldered nearly all of Merlin's weight for the long, long walk back to Merlin's flat, and he hadn't been satisfied until Merlin showed him how to lock the freight elevator.

He'd set Merlin on the couch, helped him out of his soiled shirt, brought him food and water and a washbowl and cloth to wipe the dried blood. He'd found another shirt for Merlin and helped him put it on; he'd made Merlin rest and promised that he would stay.

Merlin didn't know how long he'd slept, but it was dark outside again.

There were no lights on in the loft; the telly was silent. 

"I can't die," Merlin said suddenly. It needed to be said. He didn't want any secrets from Arthur. He wanted Arthur to know. He wanted Arthur to understand that no matter what, Merlin would survive. That Arthur shouldn't ever leave, thinking Merlin was dead.

Arthur's hand squeezed tightly around him in response, his thumb brushing the bare skin of his hip over his trousers and under the shirt's hem.

"Well," Merlin said, a little testily. "That's not quite right. I _can_ die. Painful, horrible, sometimes ridiculous deaths."

He remembered dying during the Salem witch trials; he'd made the mistake of being seen using a bit of magic to wash his clothing one day, and had burned at the stake the next. He had no idea how long it had taken for his body to heal, but by the time he woke up again, the whole mess of the witch trials had passed, the city had changed, and he'd had to steal clothes that didn't look anything like those he'd worn before.

He'd died falling off a cliff, once -- though it was more the impact of the landing than the actual fall that had done him in.

He'd died a _lot_ , and almost always unintentionally. He tried not to think of the times when it had all been too much and he'd attempted to end his life once and for all. He hoped, now that he had Arthur, those days of misery and loneliness were long left behind.

"It's my magic. My magic won't let me die. It keeps bringing me back."

Merlin kept his eyes firmly fixed on the horizon, half-afraid of Arthur's reaction. It seemed silly that he worried how Arthur would react when he heard the word _magic_ considering that they were both something of immortal, but he worried anyway.

He didn't need to. Arthur tilted his head in consideration and licked his lips before turning to look at him. Merlin bit the inside of his cheek.

"I've never died," Arthur said. "Not once. I've been hurt a number of times, and they should have been mortal wounds. I suppose that it's difficult to die when --"

He trailed off.

He didn't say anything for the longest time.

"I'm a Reaper, Merlin," Arthur whispered, his voice thick. There was a fragility to him, a skittishness of a newborn animal wobbling close to the other warm body nearby and hoping that it wouldn't be pushed away. His hold around Merlin's waist slackened, suddenly uncertain.

Merlin didn't know how to react. Of course he knew what a Reaper was. He'd been raised on childhood stories of Reapers coming to take the living who tried to cheat Death, who hunted them down relentlessly and tore away mortal souls. He'd heard all of the tales, from the horrific to the merciful, but he'd never once seen one himself, had never even known that they'd actually existed.

A Reaper.

Arthur was a Reaper.

He couldn't help the sharp intake of breath. Reapers were the creatures that even Gods were whispered to fear. Ruthless, cold, emotionless, merciless, driven to a goal.

But that wasn't Arthur. It wasn't Arthur at all.

There were so many things that Merlin could say in this moment. He could express a repugnance that he didn't feel; he could draw away from Arthur in fear for his own life; he could gasp in terror and squeak in fear and beg Arthur to go away.

Instead, he said, "An investigator. You recover stolen property and you find missing people."

"I couldn't tell your friends the truth, could I? And it is technically true. There are people who have discovered ways of stealing life that doesn't belong to them. It's happening more often now than it did a century ago, though I can't figure out how the knowledge is spreading."

"The Internet, maybe," Merlin said. It seemed obvious. There were rises and surges in knowledge and power through the ages, all related to how easily information was available to those with the thirst to learn. It was worse, now, what with the ancient lore slowly being made available over the web, with people seeking out those willing to teach. He thought he saw Arthur frown and repeat to himself, _internet?_

Arthur shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. "Anyway, they steal life from other people; and that's wrong. I have to stop them before it skews the balance. Sometimes it means I need to hunt them down because they know enough to know to run from me."

Merlin took a deep breath. When he let it out, it was slow and strained. "And that guy on the road that night? It was you, wasn't it? It was why you were there --"

"Thornbull was supposed to have died in 1984. For whatever reason, he didn't. It took me this long to find him," Arthur said, and his arm dropped from Merlin's waist. He turned away, staring out to the east of the city.

"So that damage to his chest? The wild animal attack theory that the coppers had at the time? That was you?"

Arthur's head snapped around, his eyes wide with outrage. Whatever anger he felt at the moment, he kept it tightly under wraps. His voice was quiet, but very firm, when he said, "No. It was not me. When I restore the balance, I cut the thread. They die, nothing more."

Merlin was silent. "Like my squadron. At the tavern."

Arthur's shoulders rose and slumped. He lowered his head and looked away. He nodded. "Yes. Like them."

"Arthur --"

"They should have _died_ , Merlin. But they lived. I don't know what you had to do with it, but when someone cheats death, it takes from someone else. It's my job. I have to make sure the balance doesn't shift."

Merlin looked at Arthur for a long time; Arthur shifted his weight from foot to foot in discomfort. 

"It's nothing personal," Arthur said, his tone quiet, almost apologetic.

"You could've given them a week, couldn't you? Let them go home to their families, hold their babies one more time?"

A muscle jumped in Arthur's cheek. "It was a war, Merlin. It was _that_ war. Do you know how many people weren't dying when they were supposed to? How many people were killed before their time? I had to make sure I did everything I could to keep the balance --"

"What happens if the balance is skewed?" Merlin asked, and maybe it was cruel to ask, because Arthur's expression shuttered. He took a step away from Merlin. "Is it skewed now?"

Arthur hesitated. He looked out the window. Another block had gone dark in the distance. "It's changing."

"Do _I_ skew the balance?" Merlin wasn't sure he wanted to hear the answer, but he wanted Arthur to look at him, at least. Arthur was on a fragile edge, uncertain whether he should stay or go. Merlin wasn't sure if he wanted Arthur to stay or go.

There was a flash of _something_ in Arthur's eyes, and he said, "I killed you."

"That's such a fucking non-answer," Merlin said, flinching. He forced a chuckle, and turned away. "I guess I knew that. That's why you didn't stay, right? You figured that as soon as you were gone, there wouldn't be anything to come back to. Because I'd be dead by then."

Arthur didn't answer.

"Do you do that all the time, then? Decide that some poor sucker could do with a last pity fuck before they die?"

"No," Arthur said, and he sounded hurt. Merlin stared at him in the window's reflection and watched as Arthur's outstretched hand dropped before touching him. "No, Merlin. I've never -- I wouldn't. I… Merlin, you saw _me_. No one sees through my glamour, but you did. And I knew… I knew there was something different about you. I couldn't put my finger on it. I was tired. I didn't look carefully enough. I'm always so careful, but…"

Arthur trailed off to silence.

Merlin crossed his arms tightly over his chest.. He'd heard enough. He wanted Arthur to stop talking. He couldn't form the words.

"I made a mistake," Arthur said gently. "I saw the survivors of the squadron, knew that you were part of it, and I didn't _look_. I didn't check to make sure it really was _everyone_. All I knew was that those men shouldn't have survived and that I should take them all. I should never have killed you. You weren't supposed to die. Not then, not on the train platform. I --"

"I suppose if I had to go," Merlin said quietly, "That was one Hell of a way to go. In my sleep. Without pain. After spending the night with the most amazing man I'd ever met."

"Merlin --" Arthur's voice broke. There was something so powerful in the crack that Merlin turned around. "I'm in love with you."

Merlin's mouth fell. His mind was blank. His chest swelled.

"I thought you should hear me say it when you're… when you're awake. When you're alive," Arthur said. He lowered his eyes and headed for the loft elevator.

Merlin found his voice, and when he spoke it was low and gravelly. "Are you leaving?"

"I don't want to," Arthur admitted. He paused but didn't turn around.

"I don't want you to, either," Merlin said. He took a nervous step closer and spread his hands. "Do you have to go?"

Arthur's eyes flickered toward the window just as another corner of London went black. "Something's wrong and I have to fix it."

Merlin didn't look away from Arthur. He thought that if he did, he would lose Arthur forever, that he would never see him again. "Does it have to be fixed now?"

They stared at each other for a long, stretched moment that dilated and expanded until everything went so still, it was almost as if Merlin's magic had reacted to take them both out of time. But in the distance, Merlin could hear the old grandfather clock -- the one he couldn't bear to part with in memory of the clockmaker, Gaius -- tick away the seconds. He could hear the faint screech of tyres, the high-pitch of sirens, the rat-tat-tat of gunfire that might as well have been the heralding beat of the drummer boy at the front of the battle lines.

It was the end of the world.

Merlin didn't know which of them moved first, but it didn't matter because it stopped in a crash of lips and twining arms that held the other so tightly that neither could get free, even if they wanted to. Merlin thought he heard a relieved hiss that probably belonged to him; he also heard a quiet sob that was probably his, too.

They broke for breath but didn't let the other go. Merlin closed his eyes as Arthur pressed soft kisses on the corner of his mouth, on his cheek, in the crook of his jaw, against his ear. It was with a shattered edge that Arthur whispered, " _Mer_ lin," and when they kissed again, it was with a slow slide of lips and tongue that left them both gasping and wanting more.

Merlin pushed Arthur's coat from his shoulders; Arthur pulled at Merlin's shirt. Merlin nudged Arthur toward the stairs to the bedroom. They stopped halfway up, dropping piece after piece of clothing behind them, naked before they even reached the top.

Arthur hadn't changed. He was as perfect as he had been that night in war-torn France. That broad, chiselled chest that Merlin had loved -- still loved -- to touch, the lines that he had liked -- still liked -- to trace with his tongue. The sounds that Arthur had made all those years ago -- that he made now -- as Merlin pushed him to the bed and crawled on top, their bodies fitting together with an easy glide.

It was so easy to remember the spots to kiss on Arthur's chest and throat that drew soft, quiet moans. How Arthur would push at Merlin to try to gain the upper hand and how he would groan when Merlin caught his wrists and pinned them to the mattress and chased after his tongue in a deep, deep kiss. The soft of the inside of Arthur's thighs stroking Merlin's cock with _justenoughnotenough_ pressure. The clench of Arthur's muscles as his hands closed into fists and his body trembled when Merlin nipped him along his ribs.

And, Merlin remembered how like before, Arthur's lips would curl into a smile in-between those panting breaths, how he would twist and turn beneath Merlin until he was the one braced above, how he would look down at Merlin, those blue eyes bright, those red lips kiss-swollen --

Except now, unlike that first time all those years ago, there was no desperation in his gaze, no frantic urge to have everything as long as they could while they could because they had no time. Now, there was only a fading grief and an eternal longing, soft touches reaching for everything but content to wait for them because they had all the time in the world.

Merlin took them both in hand, shuddering at the electric shock of contact against his cock, at the too-dry stroke barely slicked by both their pre-come. Arthur smothered Merlin's mouth in a kiss and hitched his hips into the circle of his fingers, but after the first few thrusts, the rhythm was too jerky, too erratic, to lure them to an end.

Arthur shifted and pressed his knees to part Merlin's thighs. Merlin needed no encouragement. He lifted his legs along Arthur's sides, wrapped them around his hips, squeezed tight, and pulled Arthur closer. Arthur's laugh was soft and breathless, and when he reached down to gently stroke Merlin's hole, there was a question in his eyes.

That very same question he hadn't asked out loud in France. That he hadn't needed to because he would never need to.

Merlin hadn't had anything then; he didn't have anything now. Condoms and lube hadn't been a part of the emergency kits on board fighter planes, and even if they had been, Merlin wouldn't have remembered to grab the kit before crashing somewhere in France's backyard. And, these days, he didn't bother with much more than the slick of soap or conditioner and a quick wank in the shower -- he'd been alone for far too long to consider stocking up on his bedroom supplies.

Seventy years ago, Merlin had turned his head away and murmured under his breath and summoned oil from the kitchens into the pocket of his trousers and shrugged his shoulders with _just in case_ in explanation. Now, Merlin took Arthur's hand and took Arthur's fingers into his mouth and let his magic soak his hole even as he sucked spit on Arthur's fingers.

Arthur's eyes widened, and the little huff of breath that kissed Merlin's cheek was a moan.

Merlin guided Arthur's fingers down; it did not take long for Arthur to learn how wet Merlin had made himself. Arthur bit Merlin's shoulder, his body shuddering with the weight of that discovery, his fingers pushing in. The stretch was a slow burn that turned to pleasure that wrenched incoherent noises, noises that could only be hungry pleads for more.

Arthur's body trembled. He swore under his breath. He leaned on an elbow and guided himself into Merlin, his body stilling only halfway to the hilt so he could brace himself and breathe, before thrusting the rest of the way.

They both gasped in chorus.

There was a pause that lasted too long before Merlin made a keening sound and squeezed trembling legs, struggling to rock against Arthur. He was pinned by Arthur's weight and could barely get the friction that he needed, but after a shift, after two, Arthur caved and eased his weight, finally, _finally_ pulling out and thrusting in.

It was slow, at first, with Arthur leaning on straining arms and struggling to contain himself until Merlin made a sound that broke Arthur's resolve and the pace increased. It was hard and fast and it eased an ache that Merlin hadn't known he'd suffered since that first night together, forever and an age ago.

Merlin pulled at his cock. He wouldn't last. The rough of his palm was a furious contrast to the slip and burn as Arthur fucked into him.

When he came, when Arthur crested right after, it was with a flash so white that the pleasure was almost pain, and he knew that he would never need to be alone again.

 

****

 

**

**ooOOoo**

**

 

****

Merlin claimed the middle of the bed. He was bundled in all the blankets that he could reach. The pillows ended up on the floor -- all of them except for the one that Arthur refused to give up.

And, most importantly, Merlin clung to Arthur with the grasp of a man who never intended on letting go.

Arthur was surprisingly all right with that. He might or might not have tried to wriggle free once or twice just to see what would happen; Merlin chased after him and pulled him back, muttering something sleep-heavy and hazy in protest. Once Arthur settled down with an indulging smile, Merlin would murmur low and pleased, his grasp relaxing.

The hours passed with Merlin curled against Arthur's side, his head on the crook of Arthur's shoulder, one arm draped across Arthur's waist, the other squished between them. Arthur's arm was around Merlin's back, holding him in place, and he alternated with stroking Merlin's forearm with his free hand, and brushing fingers through Merlin's hair.

He slept, though he didn't strictly need to sleep. It was a contented sort of doze, where he half-listened to Merlin's steady heartbeat and focused on the sensation of Merlin's thread of life, solid and thick and whole, as if it had never been broken, not once, in his entire life.

Arthur did not know what Merlin was, or why he couldn't die. He didn't know why Merlin's magic kept him alive. It was an abomination against Arthur's nature, but he couldn't find it in him to complain.

If anything, Arthur wanted to whoop with joy.

Instead, he settled for squirming further down onto the mattress, to gently shift Merlin's body against his, to feel the press of weight on top of him.

The sun's early morning light was peeking over the horizon now, edging upward reluctantly, as if the God of the Sun was afraid of what he would see once he cast his eye upon London. If the smoke in the distance and the strangled silence that followed the hours of riotous clashing during the night were any indication, the sight that would greet the lofty pantheon of Gods wouldn't be anything less than abject disaster.

Arthur did not reach out to feel the number of early deaths. He did not reach out to sense how many of the creatures had been created during the night. He resolutely ignored the nagging knowledge that the balance had shifted so far from its pivot point, it was in danger of collapsing completely. He resisted the urge to go out and to repair a balance that was far too broken to be fixed. Instead, he shut his eyes and held Merlin tightly.

Arthur could not shirk his responsibilities or he would be stripped of his powers, and where would that leave him, then? A mortal man who would live a mortal lifespan, who would die at the end of his thread of life. Merlin would be alone.

Again.

Arthur knew that, logically, he couldn't rely on his instincts to fix the balance. It had shifted so far in favour of death that unless he spontaneously gained the power to restore life, to resurrect the dead, to un- _wither_ the threads of life of the creatures roaming throughout London, there would be no repairing it. If anything, he would be forced to remain in London for as long as it took, strictly regulating the fine line between life and death. The balance would be restored, slowly, incrementally, a thousandth of a fraction at a time, but not even the Goddess of Life herself could manage it unless the swell of _withered_ were beaten back.

They were a contagion that was barely contained, that threatened to spread outside of London, outside of the country, and if that happened, well…

Arthur didn't want to think of what would happen should the balance shift that far. He didn't have enough imagination to even fathom what would happen if it did.

But it wouldn't happen because Arthur failed to maintain the balance. He would not be the cause of civilization's destruction. He had to root out the source of the _withering_ plague before it reached unmanageable proportions.

He didn't even know where to begin to look.

The low thrum of a heavy metal ringtone filled the loft.

Merlin jerked awake against Arthur. Arthur's eyes blinked open.

Neither of them moved.

The ringing stopped. 

Arthur was aware of a hard cock against his thigh, and his own grew half-hard in anticipation. Merlin's lips were dry against the side of Arthur's throat, but the kiss was aborted with a grumbling snarl when the phone rang again.

Merlin's eyes flashed gold. The ripple of magic teased Arthur's skin, and he was hard, now, just to feel that magic. The phone flew through the air and Merlin caught it; he punched a button with angry vehemence and said, " _What_ do you want, Will?"

"Well, cheerio to you too, mate, glad to hear that you're still alive and all that rot," Will said. 

Merlin groaned and pulled away from Arthur; Arthur couldn't hear what else that Will said over the phone. Merlin rubbed a hand through his hair and said, "If this is you trying to get me to cover your shift, this is where I tell you to stuff it --"

"Turn on your bloody telly, Merlin," Will snapped.

Merlin's body went still.  
"What? What do you mean? No, I haven't been watching the telly, I've been, no, never mind what I've been doing. What the fuck time is it anyway --" Merlin twisted around. After spending a confused moment staring at the bedside table, he leaned over Arthur's body and reached for the alarm clock, which somehow got knocked to the floor during the night.

Arthur shamelessly used that moment to run his hand over Merlin's arse, following the curve down to his thighs. He slid a hand up between them, finding the spot that was still wet and loose from the night before. Merlin's body twitched, but he stayed where he was, even spreading his legs a bit in invitation.

His breathing stayed the same, and he reached for the remote control to the telly, turning it on.

They stared in silence as the news flashed on the screen, as the harried anchorpeople described a sad, sorry state of affairs. There were images, too, of the chaos that had gone on through the night. Half of the city had been set aflame, the hospitals were overcrowded by patients suffering severe injuries, the police had been joined by the army in what looked to be a fruitless attempt to get everything under control. 

An anchorwoman was repeating instructions with calm, practiced coolness that belied the half-wild look in her eyes: "… requests that all citizens of London remain in their homes, to keep the doors and windows closed and locked, and to minimize travel to emergencies."

The words "Quarantine" were in bright yellow in a corner square next to the anchorman's shoulder.

"Triage units have been established throughout London. It is requested that anyone feeling symptoms of nausea, dizziness, loss of memory, physical weakness, or anyone who has been recently bitten or attacked visit the triage centres for evaluation at this time --"

Merlin shifted and turned to face Arthur; Arthur's hand slid from Merlin's bum to his hip. Merlin's brow was furrowed in a frown.

"No. _No_ , Will. Stay put. Don't even think of trying to get out of town. If you're watching the news, you know they're not going to let anyone out. Just lock yourself in the house, don't let anyone in no matter who they are, make sure you're blocking off every entrance and window -- yeah, just as if this was the zombiepocalypse or something. Is Freya okay?"

Merlin listened for a minute.

"No, I didn't get called in. What? Wait a second --" Merlin looked at his phone, pushed a few buttons, scrolled through the settings. Arthur didn't know what he was looking at, but when he spoke into the phone again, it was to say, "Yeah, it looks like they're trying to get me to come in. No, I promise I won't --"

Merlin closed his eyes.

"Lock up, okay? Don't leave the house. It'll be fine. I promise."

He hung up without another word and looked at Arthur with something of defeat in his eyes. "It will be all right, won't it?"

"I don't know," Arthur said quietly.

Merlin shifted to straddle Arthur's thighs. He heaved a slow, steady breath of a man who had seen combat and war more than once in his lifetime, and Arthur was only starting to wonder just how long a lifetime Merlin had lived and how much he had gone through. "All right. We have to do something. What options do we have?"

" _You_ don't have to do anything. It's all on me," Arthur said quietly. "I can slow them down by attacking them one by one, making sure they stay dead, though how I'm going to do that, I have no idea. Or I can find the source, stop it, and work my way through every single one of those creatures."

"Okay," Merlin said quietly, but he didn't shift his weight from Arthur's legs. He licked his lips and looked at Arthur intently. "First off, it's not on you. If you think I'm going to let you do this alone, you're wrong. I'm not exactly helpless, here."

"You can die --"

"I have yet to find something that will make me _stay_ dead," Merlin said, his voice flat. "And believe me, I've tried. It hurts like a son of a bitch to die, and it hurts like a motherfucker to come back, but I've always come back, all right? I'll always come back, Arthur."

"You promise?" Arthur whispered, even though he knew it wasn't a promise that he should ask anyone. He was a Reaper. Despite Merlin's unusual ability, Death was not a revolving door, and someone was bound to notice someday and do something about it.

That _someone_ would never be Arthur, and _someday_ would never come, if Arthur had anything to say about it.

"I promise," Merlin said without hesitation, his eyes rimmed in gold. He slid off the bed, his fingers locking around Arthur's wrist. "Now, come on. No point in fighting a losing battle against the zombies when we should look at where they're coming from."

"Zombies?"

Merlin's eyes were round and innocent; there was a slight pull of his lips into a smile. "Well, what else do we call them?"

Arthur looked at Merlin oddly, but the truth was, he didn't know what to call them. He scrambled for something suitable. "Ghouls. Of course."

"Ghouls." Merlin tilted his head. "Of course. Right. Anyway, it's epidemiology 101. We have to find Patient Zero."

Arthur frowned slightly and watched Merlin pull on a pair of pyjama bottoms. Arthur found his jeans and dressed before he followed Merlin over to the computer tucked away in the far corner of the loft, invisible around the immense bookshelves and piles of books that threatened to spill from the desktop. He watched, fascinated, as Merlin opened a program. 

It wasn't that Arthur had never seen a computer before, or had never seen one in use. It was that he had no idea how to use one -- and, in fact, had never seen the point of it until now. Why play solitaire on a television monitor when the actual experience of feeling cards in hand was so much better?

Merlin typed a search string in the text box. A list of entries appeared on the screen. Merlin scrolled through them at speeds that were dizzying -- anytime that he paused long enough to move the mouse pointer over underlined text, the page refreshed before Arthur was able to read the summary.

It didn't take long for Arthur to suffer information overload, and he backed away, feeling oddly inadequate and _useless_ , but if there was one thing that he could do, it was take care of the grumbling monster in Merlin's belly.

No sooner had he started with tea and toast -- Merlin had an appalling lack of food in his refrigerator -- that the power went out and Merlin cried out, " _Bugger_. I was so close, too."

"Close to what?" Arthur asked, holding up barely-warmed toast and staring forlornly at tepid tea. Merlin snatched the pseudo-toast out of his hand and took a bite anyway.

"Patient Zero," Merlin said, still chewing. "Weren't you listening?"

"Yes, but --" Arthur inclined his head, raised his brows, and shrugged a shoulder. "I have no idea what you mean by Patient Zero."

Merlin sank against the kitchen counter, using it for support. He brought a hand to his mouth, and his eyes widened a little in realization. "It's, um. The first detected sign of whatever's going on? It's how we'll find the source."

"Oh. Right." Arthur nodded, because that made sense. He half-turned toward the abandoned computer and glanced up at the lights. There were no sign of any of them turning on anytime soon. "Can you find it without electricity?"

"No, damn it. All the data's online," Merlin said, and he darted up the stairs. He came back a few minutes later dressed in jeans and a T-shirt; he was pulling on a hoodie on his way down the stairs. Arthur ate the rest of the toast while Merlin paced the length of the living room area. He came to an abrupt stop. "I have an idea. Where's my --"

He checked all of his pockets before dashing up the stairs again, this time coming down with a messenger bag and his cell phone. He tossed it at Arthur. 

"Look through my contacts and call Elena. Put her on speaker. I'm just going to grab a few things --" Merlin dumped the contents of his messenger bag on the couch -- papers and file folders and pens went flying everywhere. He went around the flat, adding items to the bag.

Arthur stared at the phone in his hand, willing it to do what Merlin wanted it to do.

"Did you find her on the list yet?" Merlin asked.

"No, I --"

"She should be close to the top. Number five, if that," Merlin said. "Unless I gave her a code name. Look for _Switchboard_ \-- that's probably what I put it under. Or maybe it's _China Shop_ , because she's kind of like a bull in a --"

Merlin trailed off.

Arthur glanced up. Merlin was staring at him strangely. "Is there something wrong?"

Arthur took a deep, hesitating breath before admitting, "Merlin, I don't know how to use a phone."

"What?" Merlin's brows furrowed. "What do you mean, you don't know how to use a phone? _Everyone_ knows how to use a phone --"

"Yes, well," Arthur snapped, his tone terse and abrupt. "That's good on them. While the human race advanced to the point where they could hold inane conversations with ridiculous handheld gadgets, I was out there _doing my job_."

Merlin's expression went from confused to amused to fond. He took the phone from Arthur's hand and dialled. While he waited for it to ring through, his mouth curled into a smirk, and he touched Arthur's cheek with soft fingertips. "I'll teach you."

"I don't need a telephone," Arthur said, crossing his arms.

"How else are we going to talk when you're out there _doing your job_?" Merlin asked, raising a brow. "Telepathy? Can Reapers do that? The whole psychic --"

Before Arthur could answer, Merlin turned his head minutely and pulled the phone up. "Elena? Are you all right? Oh, good, I'm really glad. Wait, does that mean you're at the station? Is everything working? _Thank God_ \--"

 

****

 

**

**ooOOoo**

**

 

****

The street they were on was deserted. The next one was mobbed. It was a hopscotch-hide-and-seek to try to get from one corner to the next, ducking past houses with doors kicked in, the front windows broken. The remains of two houses were smouldering, burnt down to a crisp, the timbers blackened and fire-hardened. The fire department had never come.

The only souls that Merlin saw were those brave ones who peered through the blinds of a second floor window, and promptly backed away, terrified, when they realized that they'd been spotted.

Arthur had an uncanny ability for avoiding humans and zombies alike, which, Merlin supposed, made a certain amount of sense considering that he was a _Reaper_ and a master of death. In some ways, Merlin wasn't sure how he felt about his boyfriend going around and finishing people off, and they would probably have a long discussion about that at a later time, when the world wasn't ending and they weren't trying to avoid creatures that were _trying to eat them_. 

Later, they'd sort out what, exactly, they were, because after finding each other seventy years later on the cusp of the end-of-the-world, "boyfriends" didn't seem to cut it.

Despite Arthur's preternatural senses, they couldn't avoid the zombies completely. 

"There's something _wrong_ with them," Arthur said in a hushed whisper against Merlin's ear, the warm breath doing things to Merlin's body that were completely inappropriate given the circumstances. "I can't feel _them_."

Arthur pointed.

They were hidden in the shadows of an alley -- shadows that weren't there until Merlin created them with a bit of magic that made Arthur quirk an eyebrow in interest -- and avoiding the latest bunch of zombies that were walking down the street. There were two of them, a blonde and a brunette, both of them svelte and slim and with a thousand-yard stare that had nothing to do with having been at war too much, and more to do with the fact that they were, as Arthur put it, "Completely off my radar."

It amused Merlin that Arthur knew what radar was, and even some of the principles of its operation, but didn't know how to use a cell phone.

Merlin watched the two women walk by. He supposed they were handsome, despite being dead; their cheeks were sunken and sallow, their skin burnished and black. Their hair was long and lustrous, and Merlin had a thought that there must be a market for beauty products for the walking dead. If there hadn't been one before, there was one now, and an advertising executive somewhere was frantically sketching up mock-ups and storyboards from under his desk, somewhere.

He bit the fleshy part of his hand to keep from laughing out loud at the mental image. Arthur shot him a concerned frown.

The two zombies were dressed in functional, but high-end clothing; leather for one, expensive silks for the other. The blonde moved with an economy of movement that hinted at martial arts training; the brunette glided down the street like a runway model, all long-limbed grace and vacant stare.

They walked past.

Merlin noticed one thing almost immediately -- it seemed as if these two zombies were _whole_ in a way that the regular, run-of-the-mill zombies weren't. There were no gaping holes in their bodies, no missing muscle, no bite marks anywhere that Merlin could see. They were also not galloping along at lurching speeds; anyone would mistake them as normal people until they spotted the hollow in their eyes.

Or unless they had Arthur's zombie-radar.

Merlin reached out with his magic just like he'd been doing during their trek to the station, trying to suss out the zombies in the same way as Arthur. Arthur was better at it. Except for these strange, out-of-the-ordinary zombies -- it was Merlin who had yanked Arthur into the alley before they were seen.

His magic flared in distaste and disgust when it touched something twisted and corrupted in the two women. Merlin looked harder, expanding his senses, but his magic didn't want to go any closer, didn't want to be corrupted. It wasn't until his magic was close enough to touch that Merlin withdrew suddenly and with a muffled gasp.

He didn't know what those women were, but he knew what was keeping them alive -- after a fashion. It was the same thing that continually resurrected Merlin when he died, that kept him young, that kept him driven throughout the centuries.

Magic.

Except it wasn't any magic that Merlin recognized. It wasn't necromancy or voudoun, locking the spirit in the body and giving them some measure of locomotion. It was magic, pure and simple, twisted and fouled, forced to submit to this vile, terrible spell.

Merlin blanched.

They were like him. Except they weren't. Not really. He'd figured out a long time ago that he wasn't quite human, that he was made of magic, that the magic might protect him and repair him when he was injured, but it wasn't magic that kept him alive -- it only made certain that he couldn't die. These women? They were dead. Absolutely, one hundred percent dead. And magic made their heart beat, made the blood pulse through their veins, made their neurons and synapses fire.

And those two women were coming toward them.

"Shite," Merlin whispered. "They must have --"

Arthur put a hand over Merlin's mouth.

 _\-- sensed me_.

The blonde looked around slowly, her eyes narrowing as she searched the surroundings. The brunette stood there, silent and serene, as if untroubled.

The seconds ticked like an eternity. Merlin felt each and every one of those seconds drag down into his bones.

And finally, _finally_ , the blonde shook her head and gestured at the brunette, and they resumed walking down the road.

Those two were _way_ too intelligent to be zombies.

Merlin waited until they were out of sight. He waited some more. He took Arthur's hand from his mouth and exhaled a breath he hadn't known he was holding, and said, "They _are_ wrong. They're not the same as the others."

Arthur's mouth tightened, but he nodded. "How much further to the station?"

It took almost an hour to dodge through one block north and three blocks east, and to make matters worse, the side door that no one ever used wasn't just locked, it was barricaded. The lock was easy enough to deal with, but the heavy filing cabinet that kept the door from opening, wedged against the far wall, was a problem.

For anyone else, that was. Merlin moved the cabinet out of the way with a bit of magical muscle, let Arthur in, and shut the door. He put the filing cabinet back in place.

"All right. We should head right for -- _mmph!_ " Merlin froze when he was slammed against the wall, lips pressed against his own in a desperate kiss. He felt Arthur against him and relaxed, and when they broke for air, Merlin half-laughed. "What was that for?"

"Did you know your eyes shine like gold when you use your magic?" Arthur's question was whispered against his ear, and he paused to kiss Merlin's neck. "Do you know how bloody gorgeous it makes you look?"

"Note to self," Merlin said with a groan, "Use magic more often."

His knees buckled under him. Arthur kept him upright, but it was a near thing.

"Save the world now, snog later," Merlin gasped, pushing Arthur off of him with difficulty. "Come on. The control centre's just down the hall."

There were signs that people had been in the station recently, though it looked abandoned now. The building wasn't the most secure, not with the large ambulance bay doors, but there were ways to secure the solid doors from the inside, and it looked like someone pulled out their bag of tricks. Merlin led the way through the dark. He knew this place like the back of his hand. One turn left, another turn left, and --

Merlin skidded to a stop, coming face to face with the double-barrel of a shotgun. He scrambled backward, crashing into Arthur. "Whoa. Whoa. Whoa --"

"Jesus fuckin' _hell_. Is that you, Merlin? What the fuck are you doing here?" 

"Didn't Ellie tell you?"

"Tell me what? That you'd come skulking in?" Gwaine lowered his weapon. He was in uniform, though his shirt was torn at the shoulder and open at the neck, his hair -- usually tied in a tight ponytail in a half-hearted attempt to follow the police dress code regulations -- in a harried mess. "Scared the _shite_ out of me, why -- oh, _fuck_ it --"

He grabbed Merlin, pulled him close, and kissed him.

"-- _mmph!_ "

Kissing Gwaine was nothing like kissing Arthur. Kissing Arthur was the whole of time fixed on the point of a pin, the pulse of the universe slowing to lengthen the moment. Kissing Gwaine was nice, but it was like kissing his kid brother. Who tasted like pretzels and M&Ms.

"Hey!" Arthur protested. He pulled Merlin away from Gwaine and stood between them.

Merlin blinked. "What the hell, Gwaine?"

"It's the end of the world, mate. I might not get another chance at you," Gwaine said, glancing distractedly at Arthur.

"Oh, nice. I'm your second choice after Elena. I'm flattered. You're doing wonders for my ego."

"Hate to break it to you, but you've just been bumped down to third choice," Gwaine said. He smiled genially at Arthur. "Who's this, then?"

" _Mine_ ," Merlin said, stepping between Gwaine and Arthur. "What are you doing here, anyway?"

"Spoilsport," Gwaine said, frowning before waving for them to follow. He headed up the corridor, talking as he went. "My partner and me? We were assigned a few blocks over when the riots broke out, but then the riots _really_ broke out. I figure I've seen enough zombie apocalypse movies to know when to get the fuck out, so I came here. Leon scattered, lost him in the crowd. Ellie didn't want to leave, she were too terrified to go outside, so we holed up here."

They walked past a vending machine. The glass plate was shattered, and the majority of the candy was missing.

"Don't judge," Gwaine said, catching Merlin's expression. "I get hungry when I'm stressed."

Merlin exchanged a sidelong glance with Arthur, and shook his head. 

Gwaine stopped in front of the door to the control centre and knocked in a complicated staccato rhythm that Merlin couldn't replicate if he tried, and Elena called out, "Who is it?"

"Your knight in shining armour," Gwaine answered. "I come bearing gifts!"

The sound of heavy objects being dragged out of the way preceded a furious yank of the door. There was light inside coming from a few candles and at least one lamp, indicating that the generators were working. Elena stepped into the doorway, looking to be in better shape than Gwaine, if a bit dishevelled, her eyes wide with exhaustion and desperation. She made a strangled sound when she saw Merlin and lunged at him.

"Oh, God. Merlin!"

She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him.

"-- _mmph!_ "

Elena was soft and curvy and smelled like lavender and vanilla and she tasted like strawberry jujubes and jalapeño pepper-flavoured crisps. As lovely as Elena was, and Merlin adored her, he really did, but she had no business sticking her tongue down his throat. He pushed her firmly away and shot Arthur a careful look. Arthur shrugged.

"Well, hello to you too," Merlin said, letting Elena go. "You're all right?"

"I'm brilliant. I would've been fine except for that one -- he brought a bloody horde of them after him when he came in, yelling his head off like a _girl_ ," Elena said, shooting Gwaine a dark look.

Gwaine ran his hand through his hair sheepishly. He shrugged. "What? I'd like to see you lot try to get away from those things without losing your shite."

Arthur looked at Merlin. "Did you lose your shite on our way here, love?"

"No, not even a little bit. How about you?"

"Of course not," Arthur said.

"Sod you two," Gwaine said, throwing up two fingers.

Elena stared between Merlin and Arthur. "Did he call you _love_? Oh, Merlin, is this your bloke? The one you've been pining for since _forever_?"

Merlin took a deep breath and pointedly ignored Arthur after he spotted the smug smirk tugging at the corner of Arthur's mouth. He exhaled in a sigh. "Elena, this is Arthur. Arthur, this is Elena."

Elena's eyebrows rose expectantly. Arthur shifted his body to face Merlin. Arthur nudged Merlin in the ribs. Merlin clenched his jaw and lasted until Elena's eyebrows nearly rose to her hairline, and Arthur had almost driven his sharp elbow somewhere near Merlin's spleen. He didn't think that he needed his spleen, but having it magically reconstructed was going to hurt. He threw up his arms.

"Yes! Okay! This is my bloke! The one I've been pining over! Now you know why I resisted your attempts to set me up on blind dates! They don't compete with this!" Merlin waved a hand over Arthur's body. 

Gwaine followed the gesture with far too much interest. "Well. I, for one, approve."

"Oh, piss off," Merlin said, edging possessively toward Arthur. Arthur's hand wound its way around Merlin's waist and squeezed him close.

"Nice to meet you, Arthur," Elena said prettily, holding out her hand. "You really must come over one day. I make a delicious fry up. We can get to know each other and invent new and wonderful ways to torture Merlin."

"I look forward to it," Arthur said. Merlin rolled his eyes and noticed almost too late that Arthur wasn't taking Elena's hand; he stepped forward to cover it up by pushing Elena into the control centre.

"Can we save the humiliating stories about pub crawl sickies and horrible patients for later? I need to use the database. Ellie, you're aces at it, can you find out where this all started?" Merlin directed Elena toward the chair near the switchboard; he twirled her chair around until it faced the computer monitors. She had several widescreens positioned in a three-way pyramid configuration that was a little disorienting, but it worked for her.

The monitors were on, the computers were humming, and it was obvious that she had been working on something, because one screen was a map lit up like a Christmas tree, another was the Health Protection Agency website, and a third was a data mining program that was probably illegal.

When Elena didn't do anything, Merlin reached for her hands and put them on the keyboard. She grunted and turned her chair around. "Quit being so pushy."

"It's kind of an emergency."

"We're well aware of that," Gwaine said with a snort, shoving the door to the control centre closed and dragging a heavy table across of it. "And Ellie's way ahead of you on this, actually. She pinpointed the first sighting ages ago. Which, incidentally, was a complete waste of time, because what is she going to do with it now? Yes, congratulations, you found out who Patient Zero was --"

"You found Patient Zero?" Merlin asked, twisting Elena's chair so that he could look at her. "Where is he?"

Elena crossed her arms. "I don't know. What's it worth to you?"

"Uh," Merlin stared at her for a long time. "Averting the End of the World? Stopping the undead plague? Making sure that the chippy wagon down the road keeps operating and feeds your filthy, filthy addiction?"

Elena raised a brow and inclined her head toward Arthur.

Merlin pressed his fingers against his forehead, rested his elbow on Elena's knee, and muttered, "Oh, God. No, Ellie. No. This is private and none of your business and you have a completely unhealthy interest in my love life --"

"Lack thereof," Elena corrected. "I just want to know. Is he good in bed?"

"Ellie!"

"Well? Is he?"

Merlin glanced at Arthur, who was standing off to the side, his hands in his pockets, his expression torn between wanting to hear the answer and wanting Elena to hurry up and get the information they needed so that they could do something about the zombie invasion. Merlin opened his mouth and closed it a few times before finally saying, "Yes. Very."

Arthur grinned.

Elena grinned. "And is he going to take care of you?"

"I don't intend on letting him slip through my fingers again," Arthur said, giving Merlin an intense look. They stared at each other with small, shy smiles, and Merlin didn't hear Elena's _You'd better_ or notice how she'd turned to her computer and was opening up several different applications.

"Unless I steal him from you," Gwaine said, breaking the silence.

Arthur snapped around, his expression stony and vengeful.

"Good luck with that. I'm with him until the end," Merlin said, stupidly pleased that, if all went well, there really wouldn't be an end. Spending eternity with Arthur? It was definitely a perk of being immortal.

"I were talking about Arthur here," Gwaine said. "One night with me, and he'll forget you entirely."

Arthur's cheek pinked up, but Elena and Merlin, in tandem, snapped, "Gwaine!"

"What! It's the zombie apocalypse! I'm allowed!"

Elena shook her head and muttered under her breath. "I'm going to shove him out the door and let the zombies take him. I don't care how fit he is or how hot he looks in an uniform or how soft his hair is --"

Merlin smothered a laugh with a forced cough.

"Here," Elena said, reaching over to grab Merlin's arm. She pointed at the map on the screen. There was a big red circle in the middle, and a graphic pin on top of it. "Right here."

Merlin studied the map, nodding to himself. Arthur came up behind him, his hand warm in the small of Merlin's back. It wasn't far. Four train stops away, or maybe fifteen minutes in a fast car and no traffic and nothing but green lights the whole way.

"What are all these?" Arthur asked, wriggling his finger in a circle over portions of the map. They were highlighted in bright red and were flashing on and off in warning. The middle circle with the pin was blinking, too.

"These, my gorgeous, gorgeous men, are the areas that the military has completely quarantined. They're swarming with zombies."

Merlin winced. "Shite."

"Ghouls," Arthur said after a moment. "They're not zombies. They're ghouls."

Gwaine grunted. "What's the difference? Ghouls. Zombies. Zombies. Ghouls. They're still going to eat our braa _aaiiins_."

 

****

 

**

**ooOOoo**

**

 

****

Merlin drove Elena's Mini ("Don't look at it like that, Arthur. Think of it as a Tardis. Bigger on the inside," Merlin had said, to which Arthur stared at him for a long time before finally nodding, too embarrassed to ask, "What's a Tardis?") as far as it would get them. It ended up being surprisingly far, despite Arthur's observations of city traffic gridlocks, because, as Merlin said, he wasn't only a paramedic, he was also an ambulance driver, and a Mini could get through tight spots that an ambulance couldn't. And, then, Merlin abruptly wished all ambulances were Minis.

Merlin's incessant chatter was probably a sign that he was nervous. Or frightened. Arthur hadn't decided yet.

"And where would you put the bodies?" Arthur asked.

Merlin startled and looked at him, scandalized. "Patients. _Patients_ , Arthur. We're really going to have to talk about this whole Reaper outlook of yours. It's morbid."

"I deal in death, Merlin," Arthur said tiredly. He'd been expecting this conversation; he just hadn't thought it would come up so soon. He tried to put it off until later. "Do we have to talk about it now?"

"No time like the present, considering that we're hurtling through London in Elena's Mini-Tardis while trying to escape the zombies --"

"The ghouls," Arthur corrected.

"-- that are not supposed to exist, because there's no epidemiological basis for their continued existence. Unless it's a previously unknown parasite of some sort, and I'm _sure_ someone at the HPA will decide that it was something like that, kind of like the whole Mad Cow debacle and prions --"

 _Mad Cow? Prions?_ Arthur mouthed to himself, and when Merlin paused in the middle of his rant to glance in Arthur's direction, Arthur did the only thing he could. He nodded in studious understanding, and hoped it was the right response. 

Merlin nodded back and said, "See? It's exactly like that. But that's because no one believes in magic or, or _Reapers_ anymore, and you and I are probably the only people on the planet who really know what's going on, but not really --"

Arthur decided he would look up Mad Cows and prions later. 

"-- figure that there's at least two sorts of creatures out there, now that I've had a chance to think about it," Merlin said. "The ones that are eating people and spawning, that are mostly dead but not really dead, and the ones that you can't sense, the ones who don't act like zombies because they're not zombies, because it's magic keeping them moving and that's why you can't sense them --"

It seemed that if he wanted to keep up with Merlin, who would be the only static entity in Arthur's existence from this point forward, if he had anything to say about it, he would need to learn a few things about the mundane world. Like the Tardis, this obsession everyone seemed to have with zombies when the monstrous creatures were clearly ghouls, and cell phones.

"Oh, my God," Merlin said after a long silence. He yanked the wheel and slammed on the brakes to squeeze through a lorry and a black cab. There was a loud scratch and screech of metal rubbing together from both sides. He winced, one eye closed, until they made it through. He looked into the side mirrors to survey the damage before accelerating down the comparatively long stretch of empty road. "Ellie's going to kill me. Anyway, the zombies _are_ zombies, but there are ghouls, too --"

Arthur looked at Merlin. At least this was a subject that he could comment on. "What are you --"

Merlin suddenly slammed on the brakes. There was a sickening crunch of breaking bones -- a sound Arthur knew well, having been on the giving end of such injuries in the past -- and the simultaneous sound of more metal crunching. The seat belts ("Put them on, Arthur. I don't care if you're a Reaper and immortal. Going through the windshield window at sixty kilometers an hour? I'm speaking from experience here. _Not fun_.") wedged painfully in Arthur's hips and shoulder, and before he could rip them off, a big white cloud exploded in his face.

He was momentarily stunned.

"Fuck, fuck _fuck_ fuck," Merlin said. His voice was muffled.

Arthur clawed at the airbag until it deflated; he sliced through the seatbelts in the same movement. He helped Merlin get free, and that was when he realized that Merlin was staring at something through the windshield.

It was one of the creatures. If Arthur were to accept Merlin's classification -- which he was only doing for simplicity's sake -- it was a zombie. 

One of many.

There was one wedged between the hood of the Mini and the side of a lorry, conscious and aware despite not having a functional lower body. It was staring at them with black eyes, its skin and body rotting and blackening. The other zombies -- there had to be dozens of them, but it would require all of Arthur's concentration to count them all, since their thread of life was so withered -- were creeping up on them from the traffic jam just ahead, slinking through the bumper-to-bumper and crawling over the cars.

"Damn it. I should've gone left. Don't make any sudden moves," Merlin said. 

The zombie at the end of the car was clawing at the hood. Its' mouth fell open, showing human teeth stained a ghastly yellow-orange.

They stayed where they were in silence, neither of them moving. The zombies, however, continued their forward progress.

"Oh, shite. What do we do?" Merlin asked. Arthur could feel the ripple of magic on Merlin's skin, just waiting to be unfurled, but Arthur wanted him to hold onto his power, to wait until they really needed it. Arthur craned his neck around, searching for a good place to go to, and found one.

"We make sudden moves," Arthur decided. He grabbed Merlin's arm and opened the door wide and suddenly, stepping out of the Mini. He forced Merlin to take one stride, then two --

_Stepped_

\-- and they emerged on the rooftop of a nearby building. Merlin stumbled against him.

Arthur turned in time to see the zombies congregate in a snarling, hungry mass on the spot where they had just been, legs sticking out of the open door.

"What the hell?" Merlin asked, staring at him angrily. "You can -- we did -- did you just teleport us? Couldn't you have done that before? Did we really have to cloak-and-dagger our way to the station? Did we have to wreck Elena's Mini?"

"I… I wasn't sure if it would work with two people," Arthur said.

Merlin stared at him some more. "Oh. Nice. Good to know. Some warning next time? Because I might have objections against the potential of being split apart into the aether like -- like I just got atomized, or if the transporter on the Enterprise failed --"

Arthur didn't know what a _transporter_ was, never mind why the _Enterprise_ would fail, and what it had to do with anything -- was that a ship? It sounded as if it were a ship -- but he snapped and said, "Would you rather have become zombie food?"

Merlin jerked back, startled. Arthur felt a twinge of regret. He shouldn't have gotten angry with Merlin. Merlin was well within his rights to be upset; it wasn't as if the two of them really knew what the other could do, and considering that Arthur's powers had everything to do with death, then, of course Merlin should be upset. But then it was Arthur's turn to be surprised, because Merlin split into a big grin.

"You said zombies."

Arthur snorted and turned away. "Where should we go from here?"

"No, no, you're not allowed an evasive manoeuver right now. You said zombies. Not ghouls. Zombies," Merlin said, and Arthur risked a glance at him. Merlin had sounded absurdly pleased -- he looked _fond_ , and Arthur relented.

"Yes, well, it's all for clarity's sake. We'll argue semantics later," Arthur said with a grumble. He waved a hand around them. "Shall we continue?"

Merlin tried for a serious expression, failing miserably despite his firm nod. "Yes, of course. We shall."

They looked at the city, at the black smoke streaming from various locations and adding to the gloom that was chasing after the setting sun. A few streetlights were blinking on, but they both knew that as soon as the sun went down, there wouldn't be much light to go by, and it would become more dangerous for them once the sun had set.

"Well, we've got this to get us there fast," Merlin said, holding up their clasped hands. "But where do we go?"

They were, as far as Arthur could tell, in the general area that they needed to be in. He closed his eyes and murmured, "I'll see if I can sense where they're most highly concentrated."

It was hard to sort through the masses scattered throughout the city, to try to localize all of the gh-- the zombies in this area, especially with the warm sensation of Merlin's hand in his own, the distracting sound of his heartbeat and the low, low thrum of his life shining like a beacon for Arthur. Bit by bit, though, he was able to focus on the withered threads of life, to tune out every abomination that wasn't close by, to pick out where they were right down to the millimetre.

There were so many of them, and they were scattered in no appreciable pattern. If Arthur had hoped that there would be an arrow made out of zombies pointing in the right direction, he was sorely disappointed. 

He tried again. And again.

By the time he opened his eyes, unwilling to accept defeat but having no other choice, it was full dark in the city. There was a chill in the air; the streetlights flickered; shadows flit between them. He heard the distant shriek of a frightened cat and the clatter of rubbish bins being knocked over, the high-pitched bark of a pack of terrified dogs. He heard people, too -- a child's scream from one corner, gunfire from another.

"I was thinking," Merlin said quietly, his fingers wriggling in Arthur's grasp. Arthur noticed then that Merlin's eyes were closed, but a tiny gleam of gold shone through the edges. "I was thinking if you can feel the zombies but you couldn't spot the other ones -- the walking dead, I guess, and in the interest of clarity, let's call them ghouls --"

Arthur couldn't help it. His lips quirked in a smile.

"-- but I could feel the magic keeping them going, I should probably see if I could find them, too, in case they have anything to do with all this. And, well…" Merlin raised their clasped hands and pointed it toward the horizon. "That way."

Well, Arthur wanted an arrow pointing the way. 

He took them there.

 

* * *

 

It wasn't easy to just _Step_ aside, to move from one place to the next. Usually, Arthur had a sense of direction, a pull, a purpose. He would latch onto the sensation of broken life and stolen life and corrupted life and find himself where he needed to be, but he never, ever, needed to be conscientious of where he emerged or of the safety of someone accompanying him, because he'd never taken anyone with him before. No one could see him if he didn't wish them to see him, but that power didn't extend to Merlin the way _Stepping_ did, because the zombies zeroed in on Merlin like he was the prime buffet.

Maybe he was, because Arthur couldn't sense anyone alive within four blocks of where they were.

They ran. They ran until they were out of breath, until their limbs ached -- Arthur had never known himself to be so _vulnerable_ , but he was, frantic with fear that something would happen to Merlin. He couldn't concentrate when running and didn't pinpoint the mob until it was too late.

And then they were trapped. On all sides.

These zombies were no prettier than the ones from the train platform. Their bodies were decomposing quickly; some of them had skin as black as ebony, their flesh sloughing off while their bodies somehow remained intact and whole except for where they had been bitten.

For a moment, a brief moment, Arthur felt a paralyzing flash of fear, of adrenaline pumping through his body, of a dizzying indecision of run or fight. But through it all, he held on to Merlin, not wanting to lose him.

He tugged Merlin close. Merlin was pale-faced, his mouth rounded in a soundless _oh fuck_ , his eyes framed in a circle of gold.

Arthur squeezed Merlin's hand. Merlin squeezed back.

"All right. Let's do this," Merlin said in a whisper that was too loud in the moment of stillness, the eye of the storm. It was a trigger that collapsed whatever was holding the zombies back, and the zombies slid toward them with the ferocity of an avalanche.

Arthur saw an opening; he pulled Merlin toward it. The zombies saw him and swarmed _around_ him, shying away like wild creatures not quite sure if the human was food or prey, but the part immediately closed in behind Arthur, around Merlin.

Magic knocked them back.

The zombies went flying. Others bowled into the creatures immediately behind them. Those that had scattered quickly hurried to fill in the gap, yellow-orange teeth bared, black eyes hollow into sunken skulls and black-tarred skin. 

There was a press behind Arthur. A pull that slowed him down. A slip of sweat and grasping fingers.

Alarm shot through Arthur's body; he whirled around in a panic, forgetting to protect himself from the zombies. But it didn't matter. The zombies didn't care about him. They avoided Arthur; they went for Merlin.

Merlin.

He couldn't see Merlin.

There was a flail of glistening limbs, a flap of torn clothing, a low, guttural groan of hunger and salivation. The zombies had piled one on top of another, forming a dome, trapping Merlin inside.

There was a grunt that didn't quite sound right, a shout that was a mangled word, and the zombies exploded in a bright burst of light and bodies.

And, there was Merlin, eyes wide and terrified, his clothing torn, his hair ruffled, his skin scratched, panting for breath but safe, _safe_ , and alive.

Alive.

The relief nearly buckled Arthur's knees.

The zombies were quick to recover. They swarmed at Merlin like a mound of honeybees. This time, Arthur nearly completely lost control -- it was like the train platform all over again. He nearly _became_ a Reaper like he hadn't been in millennia, full of darkness and misery and discord, with nothing on his mind but _death_.

Merlin reacted first, still on the edge of a panic, shouting a word that Arthur didn't understand, that he didn't know, but that he felt deep down in his soul, but that brushed over his skin. Merlin's eyes flashed and he threw out his hands, protecting himself behind a shield.

The zombies scratched at the bubble. One of them howled. Another threw itself into the air only to crash down and slide to the ground.

Arthur met Merlin's eyes.

"Go!" Merlin shouted. "They don't care about you. I'll distract them. _Go_. Fix this. Come back for me."

Arthur wavered in place, jostled now and again by the zombies scrambling to get past, unable to help and helpless, because there were so many of them, and there didn't seem to be anything that he could do to stop them. He tried to cut the _withered_ thread, to finish them, to end them, but every time he came close enough, that withered thread would slip out of his grasp, unaffected, immune.

He didn't want to leave Merlin. But Merlin was right. The zombies didn't care about Arthur. They saw Arthur as a predator, as something that they couldn't challenge, but it wouldn't be long before they lost that fear and turned on him.

"I'll come back to you," Arthur promised.

 

****

 

**

**ooOOoo**

**

 

****

Merlin watched Arthur until he couldn't see Arthur anymore, glad that there had been no argument about staying to help despite how much Arthur clearly had wanted to stay. Merlin might have the zombies' attention for the moment, but it wasn't going to last, and they didn't have the time to waste. All the zombie movies that he'd watched since the very first Romero came out in 1968 told him that, however persistent and tenacious a zombie was, eventually, they would move on to find easier and tastier prey.

As long as he stayed put, as long has he teased the zombies, as long as he didn't bloody well _die_ , Arthur had a chance to get as far away from the horde and to take care of the situation. 

It didn't reassure Merlin in the least that Arthur was a Reaper and that he was the master of death. All it took was a good, long look around to see that Arthur's power wasn't all-encompassing. And there was also the issue of the ghouls -- the ones that Arthur couldn't detect _at all_.

The ones made of magic.

Merlin rubbed the back of his head and tried very hard to ignore the zombies scratching on the magical shield. Close up and personal, the zombies weren't as inky black as Merlin had thought at first -- they were variable shades of black, russet brown and grey, with bluish highlights and purple lines throughout their bodies. It was oddly beautiful, but only if one ignored the fact that this lovely, iridescent colour covered monsters who would happily _munch on his brain_.

He shuddered.

He liked his brain where it was: in his head. As part of his body. His preferably _intact_ body, with a still-beating heart and working appendages. He didn't want to think of the mechanics of coming back from the sort of death getting eaten alive by zombies would entail. Never mind the pain of getting pieces of his body ripped out by human hands and human teeth -- never a clean endeavour. Humans didn't have sharp teeth or claws like predators. They had blunt fingers and weak fingernails and biting teeth like shovels and canines for tearing and molars for macerating.

Although, _doing_ Arthur was never going to get old, especially not now that he had a chance of doing it as frequently as possible. He couldn't believe his luck. He'd thought he'd lost Arthur forever, but they'd found each other. And he was a Reaper. Merlin could work with that -- it wasn't as if Arthur wasn't going to have to get his head wrapped around whatever it was that Merlin was, too. 

Why did they have to meet again in the middle of a zombie uprising? 

Merlin ran his hands over his face repeatedly. 

He was a little freaked out.

A zombie pile-dived the top of the bubble, and Merlin's body did a strange combination of a juddering startle and a terrified tremor.

Merlin decided that he was _more_ than a little freaked out.

He ran his hands over his body once, then twice, just to make sure nothing was missing, that he hadn't been bitten, because that was how the zombie sickness was transmitted, as far as he could tell, and a rather substantial bite was needed, complete with tearing half of someone's torso off in the process. If he looked at all of the zombies -- and he could only really stomach a few at a time before he started giggling hysterically, because, never mind being immortal and magically resurrected every time he died. _This_ was fucked up.

Freaked out was not the phrase. It was too mild. He needed a completely new language to come up with a better phrase than _scared fucking shiteless_.

Merlin's phone rang.

He jerked in reaction. The zombies, whose interest seemed to flag, all turned to look at him as one.

"Really fucking creepy," Merlin said. "Really, really fucking creepy."

He answered his phone and stared pointedly at the ground between his feet, because it was better than the squirming zombie mural all around him.

"Merlin!"

Merlin could barely hear. He plugged one finger in his ear and bowed his head to hear better. Heavy breathing, running, doors opening and slamming shut, honking horns. Gunfire. "Hello?"

"Merlin! Are you --"

"Gwen, is that --"

"-- need help, don't know where to go. Edwin went bonkers, he attacked Lance --"

"Oh _shite_!" Merlin's eyes widened. "Did he get bit?"

"He's all right, he didn't get bitten, he's -- we're -- we don't know what to do --"

"Are you still in the hospital?"

"No, we just --" There was a long silence. Merlin held his breath. Finally, Gwen came back on the line. "We're on the street right now. We were going to our flat, but the news --"

There was a gasped sob.

"One of our neighbours must have set it on fire," Lance said, his voice strong and sure, but obviously shaken. "We're wondering -- ah. Can we go to yours? It's the safest place I -- we can think of at the moment."

"Yes, yes, of course," Merlin said, giving Lance the access code even though Lance and Gwen already knew it and had one of the spare keys. "Be careful --"

Lance hung up without another word, but Merlin had heard something in the instant before the click that made his stomach turn. It had been the sound of something wet and fleshy being torn.

"Oh, God," Merlin said, burying his head in his hands.

The phone rang again, startling him. It flew out of his grasp and slid across the floor, perilously close to the shielding, before he caught and pressed it against his ear.

"Yeah, hello? Gwen? Are you --?"

"I'm outside your flat, can I come in?"

"Will?" Merlin plugged his other ear with his finger. The low grumbling hum around him was getting louder. "What are you doing outside my flat? I told you to stay at yours, hole up in the basement --"

"About that," Will said, his voice thick.

"No," Merlin said, already knowing what Will was going to say.

"Freya got bit."

Merlin sat down heavily on the ground. He crossed his legs, put his elbows on his knees, and covered his head. "Oh, God. I'm sorry. When? What happened?"

"One of the kids at the school, I guess. It got a chunk of her thigh. She hid it from me, didn't say anything, and just as we were getting all our shite downstairs, she…" Will trailed off. "You know, this isn't a conversation I want to have over the phone. Can you buzz me in? I don't have my spares. Freya --"

"You know the code, you know where the key is."

"Let me in. I'm not climbing up on that fucking ledge --"

"Use the key. I'm not home, Will."

"Where the fuck are you? If you took off out of town after you told me to stay put, mate, I'm going to be a little on the sour side with you --"

"No, no. I'm with -- I'm with Arthur," Merlin said, wincing. He glanced around but all that he had for company were zombies, and he had a random, frantic thought that he had no idea how long the shield was going to hold. "Get the key, get inside, don't get bit, lock up, don't eat all my food, and --"

"Yeah?" Will asked. Merlin could hear him rummaging around, the clicking sound of the door opening in the background.

"I just want you to know something."

"What?"

"Stay out of my bedroom."

Will scoffed. "Why would I go in your bedroom?"

"I'm serious, Will."

There was a pause, and Merlin heard the heavy building door click shut. "Is there a zombie in your bedroom or something?"

"Worse," Merlin said.

"How could it be worse than a zombie? Is it two zombies?"

"You really want to know?"

"I really want to know."

Merlin took a deep breath. "Are you sure?"

"Spit it out, Merlin. I'm getting worried here."

"We had sex. Loud, messy, all-over-the-place sex. We fucked on every conceivable surface in the bedroom. You don't want to go in there --" There was a full-body audible shudder mixed with a groan of disgust. 

Merlin managed a short laugh before he heard the click. Hurriedly, he called back. "Will?"

"I hate you."

"No, you don't."

"I do. So, _so_ much. It's a fucking zombie apocalypse, Freya got bit, and you're traumatizing me with mental pictures of you having sex with -- I don't even want to -- Oh my fucking _God_ I can't get it out of my head --"

"Will! Will! I'm sorry, all right? But listen. Gwen and Lance, they're coming to the flat, too. Let them in if they're… if they're still human, I guess. Just. Just be safe."

"Yeah, I will. Um. You too."

They didn't say anything for a long time. The dead air between them stretched and stretched, and Merlin sighed and closed his eyes.

"You're not, are you?" Will asked, his voice quiet.

"Yeah, I'm --" Merlin paused. "No. Actually, I'm in a bit of a pinch right now. I'll be fine, though. I'll see you soon."

"Promise?"

"Promise."

They hung up after Merlin heard the unmistakable sounds of Will getting into the elevator of the flat. Merlin dropped his phone into his lap and stared around him.

Zombies. He was surrounded by them.

Merlin rested his chin in his palm and tapped his cell phone on his knee.

He considered blasting them all to oblivion, but if there was a chance, however remote, that the people behind the zombies could be saved, somehow -- though, at this point, Merlin was getting the feeling that wasn't likely, especially for those that had _transformed_ so drastically. Still, he didn't want to take the risk. He took a deep breath and forced himself to look at the situation clinically. He'd been a doctor once or twice before in his life; he could follow symptoms into a logical diagnosis with an effective treatment regime.

The more he stared at the zombie who was on the other side of the shield, sitting cross-legged and mimicking Merlin's pose, the more Merlin knew that the situation wouldn't be resolved by isolation, quarantine, and a dosing of untested and dangerous sulfa drugs. It had to be excised with a surgeon's hand.

Finely, precisely, mercilessly.

Merlin wasn't certain how much time had passed, but he noticed a shift in mood -- _if_ zombie hordes could have moods. There was a sinuous movement, an inhumanely fast lurch, and the horde dissipated, drifting away like bobbing leaves in a fast-flowing stream. They scattered in different directions, purposeless, pausing to snuffle the air in the way predators did when in search for prey.

Merlin did not miss how a handful of the zombies headed in the same direction as Arthur. He clenched his hands together to keep from doing anything rash; he didn't want to attract the zombies again -- once was enough. He didn't want to let the zombies loose on Arthur without some sort of warning, either, but he hoped that he'd bought Arthur enough time to find the source and figure out how to...

To... To, well, _fix_ this.

Merlin made a dismissing gesture with his hand and the shield dropped in a shimmering cascade of light. Once the magic faded, the room was black as pitch.

It set his nerves on edge again. As if having been surrounded by zombies a second ago hadn't been enough, the hush of the room added another level of horror movie terror.

He reassured himself with a small huff that might have been a laugh if he weren't trying very hard to keep quiet. He ran his hands down his arms to warm himself, down his legs to brush off the dirt. His teeth dug into his bottom lip as he tried to figure out where to go next.

Gravel scraped along concrete behind him.

A shush of sound, nothing more. Innocent, like wind blowing through the trees, or the ground freezing at a frost.

Merlin froze, too.

What if the zombies hadn't been searching for new prey? What if they'd scented another monster, one bigger than they were? 

The faint shush became a shuffle. Fleeting, minuscule, almost unnoticeable.

Merlin tried to see out of the corner of his eye. He turned his head just a bit. He didn't really want to see what it was -- he'd seen enough horror movies, good and bad (oh, who was he kidding? They were mostly all bad) -- to know that what he should be doing right now? It was _running_. 

A shadow shifted behind him.

Why wasn't he running?

He turned his head some more, twisting his body. A glimmer of magic tickled down his arms, and his hands tightened into fists.

Something hard clamped down on his shoulder. 

" _Fuckshite!_ " Merlin screamed. His body shudder _stuttered_ away from the contact, his legs boneless and unresponsive. He slid to the ground as fingernails as sharp as knives tore through his jacket and cut into the soft of his skin, closing as tight as a vice.

He had just enough light to see by to make out the vaguely human shape. It was taller than he was -- taller than even Percy, who was one of the tallest men that Merlin knew. It was bigger than he was -- bigger than even Percy, who was one of the biggest men that Merlin knew. Broad at the shoulder, with solid arms like tree trunks, legs like railroad ties, and _ohmyfuckingGodwhatisthis_ \--

It made a low, low sound that came from deep in that black barrel chest, low and hoarse in a death-rendering groan. It made the sound again, in a quick huff-huff-huff that was almost like laughing, and its fingers clenched tight and made bone rub against bone and it _pulled Merlin to his feet_ \--

And that was about the point where Merlin remembered, _hello, not helpless_ , because a wordless shout tore from his throat as he thrust his hands out --

Pure, formless magic blasted in a bright flash of golden light between them, breaking them apart.

Merlin skidded and stumbled and scrambled back until he was crouched on one knee, ready to get up and _get the fuck out_ , magic coiling around his wrist a second time. It was a more tangible force, now, golden strips like ribbon dancing and swirling, the edges as cutting as the razor-sharp nails that had shredded his shoulder, making blood trickle and drip down his arm.

He wondered if they made rabies shots for ghouls. 

A sharp, hysterical laugh left his mouth. He should be running. He knew he should be running.

 _This_ was Arthur's ghoul. _This_ was like those two women who had been walking the streets, unafraid of the zombies. _This_ was what the zombies had fled from.

 _This_ was a man-shaped creature wrenching itself out of the brick wall that Merlin had thrown it into, big mitt-sized hands digging gouges into the stone and concrete until it crawled free. _This_ unfolded itself into a seven-foot monstrosity of muscle and solid bulk, its skin as black as pitch, its features cut in obsidian and marble. The only colour on it the red of Merlin's blood on its fingers, the blue of dark-stained stone-washed jeans, and the white of slightly crooked teeth as its mouth split into a smile.

A really horrifyingly smile.

Merlin shuddered. Ninety-nine percent of his body wanted to get out of this place like _yesterday_. One percent -- a very important one percent -- wanted to stay right here and do what he could to protect Arthur.

He swallowed the bitter bile of his flight response and raised his arm. His hand trembled. He pretended that it wasn't.

" _Magic_ ," the creature -- the ghoul -- breathed. There was awe in its voice, spoken as if witnessing Merlin's magic was a rare, precious thing -- which Merlin supposed that it was. But there was also hunger -- the sort of hunger that chilled Merlin to the bone.

The ghoul licked its lips.

That did not do good things to Merlin's flight or fight response. _At all_.

There was no warning. No motion telegraphed. No hitch of breath or tense of muscle. The ghoul moved fast. It bounded from one step to the next, smooth and graceful like a cat, arms and fingers outstretched.

Merlin froze like he was a fucking private on the battlefield again -- there was a reason why he became a pilot in the Second World War -- before instinct took over. He flung his magic at the ghoul, again and again --

It ducked and dodged as seamlessly as if the projectiles were harmless balloons in the air, even as brick and stone splintered and _exploded_ on contact --

Merlin turned and ran.

He made it two steps before claws slashed down his spine, tearing his jacket from shoulder to opposite hip. He managed one more stumbling stride before a solid, physical _mass_ collided into him, sending him flying forward, arms outstretched to brace against the fall.

Merlin's breath was knocked out of his lungs. He gasped and rolled to his feet. He had one foot under him, his fingertips on the concrete --

The ghoul clamped its hand at the back of Merlin's neck and squeezed --

Merlin screamed. Cold fingers bit through the collar of his shirt, cutting into his flesh, piercing, piercing, _piercing_. Warm blood trickled down his back, flesh tore and rendered as he was hauled off his feet. He thrashed and kicked, but every movement he made only made it all hurt even _more_. He clawed at the hand holding at him, trying to get free --

He couldn't. The arm was like metal; the hand like a wrench around a screw, tightening at every twist.

Merlin's vision sparked with the white of pain. "Oh, _fuck_. Don't eat me --"

The ghoul didn't answer. It carried Merlin forward.

Merlin didn't know where the ghoul was taking him, and he was damned if he'd become someone's dinner. He did not want to die that way. He did not want to come back to life after this monster _shat him out_ \--

_Did they even shite?_

\-- he didn't even know if he even could come back to life after something like that.

Desperate, Merlin drew on his magic. It tickled on his skin, eager and dangerous, but it fizzled and popped and faded with the lifeless crackle of lightning falling flat across a puddle of water and hitting rubber.

The ghoul's huff-huff-huff was almost _really_ laughter, now, though it didn't speak. 

Merlin tried again. The magic lashed out around him in a burst of light, flaring around him with the swirl of a cape, and just like the last time, the magic sputtered uselessly, brightening in one last spark before winking out like fireworks bursting in the night sky.

The ghoul was a leech. It was _eating his magic_.

"Fuck, no. Fuck, _no!_ "

Merlin flailed his arms and kicked his legs and connected an elbow with the ghoul's face and a foot in the ghoul's shin. He grabbed the doorjamb with a hand and could feel the dirt on the floor through the toe of his shoe.

The ghoul made a sound that was too much like a snarl for Merlin's liking and --

Merlin's head hit the wall.

Everything went black.

 

****

 

**

**ooOOoo**

**

 

****

Arthur wasted far too much time skulking about, uncertain whether his presence would attract the zombies. He didn't want to waste the opportunity that Merlin had given him, and, loathe as he was to leave Merlin in the first place, there was no going back now, no matter how much he wanted to. He was close. He could almost taste it.

He had to trust that Merlin's magic would protect him, that it would keep him safe, that the zombies wouldn't be able to break through his shielding. And, most importantly, he had to hurry to end all this as quickly as he could so that he could return to Merlin, to reassure himself that Merlin was alive and well, and to take him away from here.

Even as Arthur watched warily for zombies, waiting as they shuffled past without so much as a glance in his direction, he kept a part of himself aware of Merlin, ready to _Step_ into that open space at a moment's notice if he should so much as feel a threat to Merlin's life. That strand was the brightest, strongest thing he could feel in the building; he didn't think that he would miss even the slightest injury to the man he'd thought lost to him forever. He would _not_ lose Merlin again, he promised himself fervently, and pressed on, because ensuring Merlin's well-being and long survival was tied with stopping this threat on all life in London before it grew out of hand.

The more he moved through the convoluted building, with its maze of corridors and debilitated walls, the more Arthur realized that the zombies barely cast a glance in his direction; one or two would be aware of his presence and would flinch away, while he was invisible to the remainder. They shuffled on, snuffling the air, before heading in the opposite direction, as if very much aware that they needed not to be there in that instant.

Arthur tried not to think too much on it. 

He hadn't seen a zombie for some time; marks of their passage, of their existence, yes, of those there were many, as witnessed by the scratches along the walls, the black-brown smears of decomposing flesh on the floor, the bloodstains splattered on random surfaces and the festering reek of rot in the air. The distant shuffle, the creak of floorboards protesting passing weight, the building's groan as it seemed to swell impossibly, like a breathing creature, as it accommodated yet more. Arthur was aware of all these things, that he was surrounded, that he was the eye of a storm, and the storm swirled around him with every promise of narrowing in on him.

That was the only sign that Arthur did have that the zombies were aware of him and that, for some reason, had elected to remain away. He couldn't attribute any logical intelligence to them, only a sort of a herd mind, functioning on the hind brain that was aware of a potential food source and how difficult it would be to take him down.

Just as he knew the zombies were near, he knew that he was being herded, after a fashion; when he went in an unfavourable direction, the distant wall of zombies thickened into a buzzing wall of hornets intent on keeping him from passing through. He couldn't -- he _wouldn't_ \-- give the creatures that much credit, but he quickly revised his opinion when he walked into a large room central to the building, with a curved, warehouse-style ceiling, unadorned cement pillars, dusty skylights, and, highlighted by some sort of inner glow, a throne.

A throne.

The throne was large and clunky, made of stone, the armrest and the backrest lovingly hand-carved with sigils and effigies that reminded Arthur of a heyday when such artisanship would be praised. The seat was broad and deep, and upon it was a pale, frail man.

Some effort had been made to dress him in modern clothing; shoes that did not look the least bit scuffed, trousers a little too short, a shirt that was too large in the neck and too wide in the chest and not long enough in the arm, the cuffs flapping loose around thin, bony limbs and long, knobby hands. The man was sunken and sallow and slumped, his cheekbones high but his jaw narrow, a sharp nose ending on a point, the weighed brow sunken by strain and a kingly crown, his white, white hair carefully combed back.

The whole of man and throne was swathed in silvery spider webs that cocooned him in place, as if in binding, holding him prisoner.

Arthur thought it odd that this man -- whose life he could feel in a muted, but vivid thrum that was a shade in comparison to Merlin's vibrant thread -- hadn't become fodder for the zombies, and that could only mean one thing. This man was behind the disaster. Arthur crossed the distance between them, pausing with a foot on the base on the throne, reaching out with a cautious hand to tear at the webs before deciding to keep the man trapped where he was, and to finish him instead. Arthur knew with certainty that the zombies were associated with this man, that he was responsible, somehow -- he did not wonder why, he did not ask. It was best to simply act, to make it quick.

Merlin was waiting for him.

The man opened his eyes.

They had been blue, once, but now they were washed out by time and dynasty to something of a hollow, disembodied grey. White lips stretched out and defied the wrinkles on his skin and caused the webs on his flesh to twist into something of a pleased smile even as his expression fell to one of serenity, finality and acceptance. Arthur had seen this look many, many times upon those whose lives were coming to a close, who had lived and had lived long and were ready to accept the end.

His mouth worked but there were no words. The man breathed in and breathed out a sigh, and Arthur stayed his killing hand.

"I have waited a long time," the man whispered, his voice broken with disuse, hoarse like grinding gears shrugging off the layers of grime and dust and rust and coming to life again. "I did not think you would ever come."

"This is all your doing?" Arthur asked, tilting his head jerkily, unable to keep the outrage and the anger out of his voice.

"Not… willingly," the man said, closing his eyes with a grimace of pain. This was something that Arthur recognized, too; guilt and shame.

He hesitated. "I know everyone whose life I am meant to take. I don't know you. Who are you?"

The man opened his eyes again, and there was a kindness in them even as he tried to sit up straighter, to ease himself into a more regal pose than that of defeat. "I was a King, once. A foolish, greedy King. I thought I could cheat Death, but it is I who has been cheated."

Arthur glanced over his shoulder when he thought he heard a sound, but there was nothing but the echo of distant silence in the large room. "How?"

He was a Reaper; he did not need to know the fine details of someone's escape from his scythe. He needed only know where to cut. But this once, this one time, Arthur felt an inexplicable need to know, to understand, because he needed to know and understand how something like this could affect Merlin, if it could affect Merlin at all.

The King didn't answer. Arthur thought that he wouldn't, and he wasn't surprised. Then he was, because the King rubbed the throne with the palm of his grey hand. The movement was jarred and jarring, held in place by the web binding him. 

The throne.

Arthur reached out to touch it but felt nothing. He studied the sigils but didn't understand what he saw. There were lines; there were squares. There were whorls; there were squiggly lines. He thought that it might be a language of some sort, archaic and ancient, indelible to the modern eye, but he had been around this earth nearly as long as there had been a human civilization, and he didn't recognize these signs.

He tugged at the web, meaning to free the man. He wanted to give the King the dignity of dying free, however he wanted, despite that he was already wrapped in a silky shroud.

The web didn't give. Arthur twined his fingers through it and pulled with all his might; the strands held firm, cutting lines in his hands.

This man, this King, was a prisoner.

"Who did this to you?"

It was not often that Arthur encountered someone who was made immortal through no fault of his own, and it was rarer still that those people remained victims of circumstance. He was enraged on this man's behalf, that he had no choice in this, that --

"I did this to myself," the King said softly, the words a confession shattering the still air. Arthur's anger rose and fell, wobbling uncertainly. The King touched the throne again, his fingernails scratching into the stone. There were groves in the hard granite, carved in from all the time that he'd been imprisoned there. "I alone strove to live until the end of time. I alone cast the magic upon the chair. I alone sat upon this throne."

Arthur stared at the King with disbelief. His eyes darted to the throne and he took a step back, shaking his head. "Did you chain yourself to it, too?"

"That…" The man's rheumy eyes stared down at the ground. "That was not my doing."

"Who, then? They're responsible for this, they need to --" Arthur's silence was won only by the startle of the man's sharp gaze on him.

"It matters not. It matters not," the King said urgently. "You must be quick. End my life."

"And everything returns to the way it was?"

The King looked both hopeful at the promise in Arthur's words and saddened by the question. "It will not… spread."

Arthur knew the truth when he heard it, but this wasn't the truth that he wanted to hear. "It couldn't be that easy, could it?"

"When it comes to magic," the King wheezed, "There is always a price to pay."

"I'm going to have to hunt them all down? Kill them one by one?"

The King heaved a heavy breath and closed his eyes.

"Oh, blast it," Arthur muttered, taking another step back. "Then what good will your death do? What will it do to the balance? Do you know how far it's fallen, how precarious it is? I don't even know if I can save it now."

"Please," the King whispered. He reached with his hand, his fingers outstretched, entreating, pleading.

One more death. One more unnecessary death. Perhaps cutting this man's thread would restore the balance by returning the life that he shouldn't have lived. Perhaps it would weight the scales in the wrong direction and send the planet teetering into oblivion. Arthur didn't know. He couldn't know. And he didn't know what to do. 

He needed Merlin for this. It was magic that kept this man alive, just as magic that kept Merlin alive. Arthur didn't understand magic. Merlin did. 

But Merlin wasn't here, and Arthur had to decide. Ending this man's life might not restore the balance, it might even make it _worse_. It might not even stop the contagion. There were too many uncertainties.

The King's thread was withered, stretched so thin that it was finer than a hair. It wouldn't take much to cut it. To stop all this.

Arthur ran his hand through his hair. He blew out a breath. He nodded. "All right."

The King smiled, soft, pleased, happy. For a brief moment, the creases of pain and sorrow eased from his brow.

"There's no chance of this happening again?" Arthur asked.

"There is no one else with the magic who could sit here. They have all died, long ago," the King said, and Arthur had a feeling, a sick, sinking feeling, that maybe that wasn't true at all. He didn't think of Merlin. He didn't say Merlin's name. He put Merlin firmly out of his mind. Merlin would never do this. Arthur would never let him. 

And, besides, there was one small mercy. Merlin didn't need the chair to stay alive the way that this King did.

"I hope you've made your peace," Arthur said.

The King closed his eyes.

Arthur reached out with his hand, not to touch the man, but to grasp the thread of life, to cut it as cleanly as he could.

He heard a growl behind him. The King's eyes flew open in alarm. In a flash, the alarm turned to dismay.

A tall man walked toward them. He was tall and broad and overwhelming in the way large men of his size were overwhelming, filling the chamber with his bulk and a presence that wasn't quite palpable, but which existed in a shade of _empty_ simply because the man was simply _there_.

His clothing was nondescript -- a shirt, trousers, boots. His hair was shoulder-length and long and stringy, pushed away from his eyes. His face was unremarkable: a sloped forehead, a Roman nose, a thin line that was a mouth, hollowed cheeks over a strong jaw, skin charcoal dark and dusty, as if to touch it would smear fingers and palm. The man's eyes were black within black within black, like the zombies', but alive and alert the way the zombies weren't.

He was like the zombies in a lot of ways. He was unlike them in exactly those same ways. A zombie's body was tainted and blackened, limbs narrow and thin; this creature was solid and strong. The changes turned zombies into hulking, slavering things, hugging close to the ground as they moved lest they tumble and fall; this creature glided across the floor as he walked, smooth and certain, with the trained grace of a dancer or an acrobat. His face was human; his hands were human; his manner, though monstrous, was still human.

He was dragging something. It was the size of a man. Arthur couldn't see past the creature's large hand around the body's neck. There was a thatch of black hair, the pale flash of skin, the limp of a hand trailing on the ground.

Arthur's heart clenched and caught. He did not need to reach out to know who it was.

Merlin.

The clothes were torn, there were growing bruises on his face, and there was blood.

Arthur's hands closed into fists.

"Tristan," the King said wearily, his body slumping and sliding like a man who wished to cover his face with his hand. "What have you done now?"

The creature grunted, but didn't answer.

"Please," the King said, turning to Arthur, "Please do it now. Before he stops you."

Arthur's eyes were fixed on Merlin. The heels of his shoes drew lines in the dirty floor as he was dragged along. He didn't move, but Arthur could sense his life strong and solid, his thread untouched. He was alive, and that was his only relief, great as it was. "Who is he?"

"He is... He was my protector. He..." The King paused. "He became overzealous."

Arthur glanced at the King. He turned back when he heard a pause in movement. Tristan stopped in the middle of the room and dropped Merlin to the ground; Merlin slid and slumped down bonelessly, his head bouncing once. Arthur imagined a thousand deaths for this Tristan, that he would hurt Merlin. "What is he going to do with... with him?"

"What he always does," The King said. He waved his hands as much as he could, restrained as they were. There was an element of despair in the gesture. "He will try to turn him into another creature like him."

"You can do that?" Arthur asked, startled.

The King looked down. "The throne."

Arthur looked down, too, and repeated, "The throne."

Their eyes met, and the King entreated, "Please --"

"Did the throne make them all? All of those --"

"I have only made three. I... I have refused..." The King's tone was high-pitched and the gaze he darted between Arthur and the creature was frantic. " _Please --_ "

An instant could feel like an eternity. Knowledge could bloom in that moment, full like a flower with a multitude of labyrinthine petals and heady scent. And Arthur connected the pieces as well as he could, given how little that he knew and how little that he understood.

The ghouls that they had seen on the road on the journey there; the two women? They had been as whole and certain as this Tristan was, fearless and strong. But the zombies? They were shades of the ghouls, lesser beings, a taint, a sickness.

The King wouldn't make _more_ , and the ghouls, however they'd done it, for whatever reason, had made the zombies. And the zombies were wrong, twisted, cursed.

This apocalypse was the ghouls' doing. Arthur had to --

Tristan advanced on Arthur, his shoulders rounded forward, his head down. He was a bull charging toward a target, putting on a burst of speed in the last few steps, catching Arthur by surprise. A fist like a sledgehammer struck Arthur's jaw.

He staggered. Tristan followed after him, pushing, pushing, _pushing_. Arthur clambered back, trying to keep his footing, falling finally to the ground with a grunt.

"No, Tristan. No," the King whispered, shaking his head. "Please. No more."

Tristan ignored the King. Arthur blocked a punch. He blocked another. The third broke through his defences and knocked the wind from his lungs.

" _Tristan_ ," the King whimpered.

Arthur kicked at Tristan's chest, wanting space, wanting time. Tristan grabbed his foot and twisted; pain unlike anything Arthur had ever felt jolted up his leg until there was a snap.

Arthur howled.

Tristan silenced him with a knee in the chest and a punch in the face. Arthur caught his arm before it could come down for another blow, but it was a struggle. Tristan was _strong_.

A Reaper should be stronger.

He twisted Tristan's arm to the side. He heaved Tristan's knee from his chest. He pushed Tristan as much as he could just as his broken leg twisted back into place with an audible, startling crack.

It hurt. The pain was blinding white and uncomfortable and new, but he kept moving. He circled around Tristan to get to Merlin, but Tristan kept getting in the way.

"If I kill him, will --" Arthur didn't get a chance to finish his question. Tristan lunged. Arthur was carried in a rugby player's tackle and driven into a pillar. The concrete crumbled, the steel at his back unyielding. Tristan took a step aside; the lack of support made Arthur slip to the ground. 

Tristan's knee came up; Arthur blocked it with crossed hands, but the strength of the blow slammed him into the pillar again. Tristan kicked him once, twice, three times, moving at sure, steady speed, and Arthur's body collapsed under the impact.

 _Strong_ was too mild a word to describe the ghoul. There was a blessed moment when Tristan retreated, when Arthur slipped to the ground on hands and knees, when he could take a breath and cradle ribs and grimace as his body took this rare moment to repair itself. Cracked bones shifted and realigned and knitted together; stretched muscles relaxed and eased; aching bruises faded before they even began.

Merlin shifted.

There was a faint groan.

Merlin curled in on himself, muttering inaudibly.

 _Alive_ , Arthur remembered. Merlin was alive. 

And Arthur -- Arthur was a _Reaper_. No one ever escaped him. No one ever beat him.

Tristan made a sound of displeasure to realize that Arthur was still in the fight, that he hadn't given up, that he hadn't _died_. He came at Arthur with the quick, light steps of someone gathering strength for one final blow --

With a roar, Arthur surged to his feet --

 

****

 

**

**ooOOoo**

**

 

****

Merlin would thank God -- or whatever deity he owed for his continued existence -- that he hadn't died again. Then he tried to move and cursed God -- or whatever deity he owed for his continued existence -- that he hadn't died, because resurrection was a damn sight less painful than what he was suffering right now.

He took stock of his body parts and their conditions as he slowly uncurled from his protective knot. Limbs: intact. Torso: intact. Head: probably cracked and missing several key components, but relatively intact. There was a knot forming on his skull, there was blood down his face, and his shoulder ached where the ghoul had dug its fingernails through his jacket, but he hadn't been _eaten_. All things considered, things could be worse.

There was a faint sound of ringing bells in his ears and a distant scuffling sound. The room he was in was cavernous and dark, and Merlin groaned as he blinked his eyes open, squinting as he risked a slow look around.

There was a pale white throne, a man seated upon it, the quick black streak of the ghoul lunging in a fierce attack, and an earth-rending _roar_.

From Arthur.

Arthur.

Arthur met the ghoul's strike with a block that knocked the ghoul's arm aside; Arthur's body twisted, collecting power, and he delivered a blow of his own. The ghoul slid away, falling to one knee, an arm around its waist in dumbfounded outrage. It stared at Arthur in incredulity -- truth be told, Merlin did, too, a little -- before it curled its shoulders close around itself and slowly stood up.

Arthur, heaving a heavy breath, straightened, too, back straight and proud, chin down with cold, calculating surety. The air shifted in an almost metallic clang, like gauntlets crashing on the stone ground.

Merlin knew that sound. It resonated in his memory like an old friend, except there was a difference this time. The clatter rang clear and bright, horns of Heaven sounding down, the rattle of scabbards emptying singing blades into the air.

And in that instant, that precious instant, Arthur smiled, cold and dark and resolute.

His human seeming dropped.

Black wings unfurled, stretching out in a cloud of menace, a shield of protection. They filled the chamber, deceptive in their softness, absolute in their strength.

Arthur seemed to grow in strength and size, though nothing had changed but the Reaper's wings, wings that swept behind him as if blown back by a strong wind, rippling and shining like satin. The wings became a cloak draping Arthur's shoulders, heavy with a cowl shrouding his golden hair and masking his eyes; the wispy material floated and swirled around Arthur's ankles, momentarily hiding him from view.

The ghoul, either too stupid to realize what it was up against or not caring, took a dangerous step forward, its lips pulled over those eerily white teeth in a snarl that would have Merlin losing his shite if he hadn't already lost it some time ago. Arthur matched the ghoul's snarl with one of his own.

From his cloak, Arthur drew a sword.

It was a simple blade with an unadorned crosspiece, but it shone with a light of its own, bright and terrible and beautiful.

Just like Arthur.

The sight of him like this, revealed, without secret, without hiding what he was under the weight of the stigma that came with being a Reaper -- it caught Merlin's breath in his chest, it made his heart ache, it made his soul _want_. And still, he closed his eyes when Arthur clashed with the ghoul, the upswept strike frozen to his memory, to keep perfect that moment of sheer, complete _beauty_.

He opened his eyes to see the two locked in combat, the ghoul lashing out with clawed hands and blocking with limbs as solid as marble, Arthur sweeping the blows aside in an unearthly glide and bringing down the blade in a cutting guillotine strike.

A soft, pained noise tugged at his awareness; Merlin ignored it.

It came again, wrapped in a feeble plead.

He glanced at the throne a second time since waking, and barely paid it the mind that it deserved, because Arthur had been knocked back, and was slipping, hand and foot, across the dusty, dirty ground.

Merlin held his breath; he grunted as he pushed himself to his feet, the world suddenly listing to the left, suddenly listing to the right. He shook his head. He reached for his magic; he could feel it now like he couldn't when the ghoul had grabbed him, when it had eaten his magic like it was teatime. It flared and pulsed, indignant and enraged, sparking and flashing around Merlin even as Merlin tottered on wobbly legs and prayed for balance. He had to help Arthur, but as he watched, Arthur easily fended off the ghoul, there one moment, gone the next, and the ghoul stumbled into a pillar.

"Please," the old man begged.

Merlin looked at the throne for a third time, a wave of annoyance wrapping around an unspeakable urgency. He had better things to do right now, he had _Arthur_ to save --

Except the throne was shining bright, sparkling like stars, luring him like a moth to a flame. It scintillated, it twinkled, it rippled with iridescence --

Merlin took an unsteady step closer, blinked his eyes, and squinted.

He had been a fool often enough in his life that he had died for it more times than he could count, but if there was a hard lesson that he had learned, it was that even pretty things hid dangerous snares. This one, beneath all the glamour and shine, was twisted and ugly, decrepit and rotting, a gaping maw hungry for sustenance.

Upon the throne sat a husk of a man, wrists shackled with fine slivers of silver, but those chains weren't chains at all; they were fetters with ghostly suckers attached to skin and soul and _magic_ , gulping it down drop by golden drop with the starving hunger of a rabid predator. 

"My God," Merlin said.

"Help me," the man said. He glanced with cold grey eyes toward the battle. "Help me. Please."

"I wouldn't even…" Merlin took a step back; that was a mistake. The world swayed under his feet and he nearly fell to his knees, and would have if he hadn't flailed his arms around in a wild windmill. He held up a finger, took a deep breath, and studied the tangled, coiled, barbed mess that was the power around the throne. Despite the decay, the throne was immovable and unbroken, as if not even the end of the world could shatter it. "I wouldn't even know how to begin."

"Please," the man said again, his voice a soft keen.

Merlin took an involuntary step forward. His legs were steadier, now, but his head pounded and his magic trembled on his skin with the jerky itch of a street thug looking for a fight, but he knew without a doubt that this was a fight he couldn't win. He was revolted and nauseated simply being so close to the throne, and he couldn't forget how the ghoul had _fed_ on his magic. The throne looked too _predatory_ to Merlin's eyes.

He resisted the pull of the throne. He forced himself to stop and ask, "What do you want me to do? Let you go? What will that do?"

"Kill me --"

Merlin made a small, strangled sound. The request made his stomach turn. It did something foul to his soul. He might have been a soldier once, twice, several times, but that had been for _war_ , and he had spent his lifetimes as a druid, a shaman, a healer, a midwife, a nurse, a doctor, a paramedic, as someone who saved. Who _healed_. The question tore from him before he could think. "My God, man. _Why_?"

"If you do it," the man said, his eyes sparkling with desperation, "Then… This will not continue."

Merlin glanced at Arthur, locked in combat with the ghoul. He turned to the man again and swallowed the bile in his throat. If killing meant that this whole bloody nightmare would be finished and done with, then, he'd do it. If he had to.

"Quickly. There is no time."

"Okay. Okay," Merlin said. He raised his hands and hesitated. He didn't have a weapon, he didn't relish using his magic to kill, and he certainly couldn't do it with his bare hands. He covered his face and shook his head, dropping his arms. "No, no. I can't. I can't --"

" _Do it, Merlin!_ " Arthur shouted.

There was a loud thump at the other end of the large room. Zombies filled the doorway, crawling over each other in their haste to get through. They spilled over on top of the other, black bodies and gangly arms and splayed legs glistening in the gloom, a jar of insects spilled onto the ground.

Merlin shuddered and felt his insides quail.

Kill the man, end all this. 

That was all that he'd have to do. He could save London; he could save Arthur. Preferably before the zombies were set upon him and ate him. He really didn't want to die this way.

It made his head hurt. He raised his hands again, meeting the man's eyes. There was hope in those eyes, calm acceptance.

Merlin made a decision. He couldn't do it. He couldn't --

"I'm really sorry," he said. He turned around and shouted, "Arthur! _Switch with me!_ "

The effect was immediate, without question, without reservation. One instant, Arthur's blade was swinging in an arc, cutting at the ghoul's torso. In the next, he turned on his heel and ran toward Merlin, his cloak streaming behind him in a ghostly, smoky banner. The ghoul roared and chased after him.

Arthur and Merlin's eyes met. There was nothing but trust in Arthur's gaze, trust that Merlin would do whatever he could to ensure that Arthur could do what he had come to do. Merlin nodded minutely, heaving a breath, swearing in that moment that he wouldn't fail Arthur.

Merlin's magic rose and swelled until he couldn't contain it anymore.

Arthur's sword swung in a whistling arc. Not even the strongest shield in the world could deter it.

The ghoul was caught by the blinding flame of magic, thrown off its feet, scalding and disintegrating under sheer power and might. It flailed at the magic that surrounded him, that engulfed him, batting with frantic hands and shrieking an inhuman screech as the magic pulled it apart.

The thunk of sword sheathing itself in stone was the only confirmation that Merlin needed that the man was dead, but he turned to look anyway. The man slumped on the throne, his body untouched, and whatever life remained leeched out with an audible sigh as the silvery web sucked the last grain of magic.

The throne shuddered. It dimmed. It went black. It lost its lustre, its shine, its siren's call.

Merlin gasped in exhausted, terrified relief. Arthur wrenched the sword out of the throne and gave him a wan smile.

The skitter of footsteps and a low, surround-sound moan caused every nerve ending in Merlin's body to tense up and turn around, eyes wide. The zombies had made it through the doorway and were spreading out in a semicircle, inching toward Merlin at alarming speed.

Merlin's entire body juddered and he took a step back. "They're --"

He pointed a finger. Arthur followed the gesture.

"Shouldn't they --"

Arthur made a noncommittal sound. "Hm?"

"The old man --" Merlin began, but he didn't even know how to finish that sentence. All the energy sapped out of him and tickled his skin as his magic mustered up a second wind to shield him from the zombies. He threw up a hand in the air. "Well, this is all very anticlimactic. I thought we saved the world."

"We did," Arthur said, his breath warm against Merlin's ear. "All that's left is the clean-up."

"Great," Merlin muttered. His body tensed involuntarily when the closest zombies snuffled the ground at his feet, clearly scenting prey but wary and reluctant. Maybe, like wary predators, they caught the scent of scorched remnants of the ghoul somewhere on the other end of the room, and were having second thoughts of eating Merlin? 

As if merely thinking about the ghoul had the power to bring it back to life, a loud crash startled Merlin clean out of his skin. They both turned around and stared at the smouldering husk as it rolled out of the wall. 

Every inch of it creaked as bone and sinew and skin shifted on its enormous frame. It unfolded and straightened. Swirls of smoke drifted from its shoulders into the cool air.

It stood and stared at them.

"Arthur --" Merlin's voice was hoarse, barely over a whisper.

Arthur pulled Merlin close, their bodies touching from chest to thigh. Arthur's arms encircled Merlin at the waist. The Reaper's shroud drifted of its own accord, the cowl falling over Arthur's head, the long sweeping cloak wrapping around them both.

It felt like feathers on Merlin's skin.

"Close your eyes," Arthur said.

 

****

 

**

**ooOOoo**

**

 

****

_One year later_

Merlin's weight was comfortable against him. Arthur tightened his hold around Merlin and waited.

They sat on the roof of a cab that was at the very top of the London Eye, the clouds clearing just enough for the dawn that was about to breach the horizon. Merlin's head was on Arthur's shoulder, his body framed inside of Arthur's legs, kept secure against the slip and slick of the dew-covered capsule.

Arthur pressed his lips against Merlin's throat in a soft kiss. It was only as he nearly drew away that he felt the first frantic skips of a reawakened heartbeat.

Arthur preferred to think of it as _reawakened_ rather than resurrected, because it implied that he had failed to protect Merlin. Which he had, but that was an accident. Just like every other time.

Merlin's body jerked. Arthur held him tightly to prevent the inevitable startled flail. It wouldn't do to lose his grip, to have Merlin slip and fall all the way from this great height to the ground.

"Shite," Merlin said, his chest rising and falling with strangled breath and racing heart. His hands were warm, now, and curled around Arthur's arms. "Did I die again?"

"I promise I didn't let them eat you," Arthur whispered. He managed a soft chuckle, but the truth was, he didn't find it funny. Every time Merlin died, Arthur felt a part of himself die, too.

"I wouldn't even had been on the menu if you hadn't _vanished_ on me, you prat," Merlin groused.

"I wouldn't have vanished if I hadn't been trying to save a van full of kids from the swarm," Arthur said, pressing a kiss on Merlin's brow.

"They were _safe_. They were in a _van_. The zombies aren't that smart, they wouldn't have gotten in. The kids could've held out a few more minutes," Merlin said.

And they would have, if the driver hadn't panicked and bailed, leaving the door open behind him. "No, Merlin. They couldn't have."

There was a long silence full of scrambling as Merlin took stock of himself, making certain that he was whole. He did that every time. Then, finally satisfied, his hands settled on Arthur's thighs and he asked, "Where are we -- no, wait. Why are we here?"

Somewhere between discovering Merlin about to become zombie food and carrying him to safety, Arthur had come to the realization that he hadn't watched a sunrise with Merlin. He didn't want another day to pass without that happening.

"No zombies," he said instead.

"Oh," Merlin said after a long silence. He patted Arthur's knee. "Good choice, then."

The sun crawled over the horizon, the slow fade of nightly purples and brightening orange flame marred only by the black smoke curling to the sky from the city below.

"I guess a little tavern somewhere in the French countryside was out of the question?"

They had both heard that morning's news broadcast. Despite all the travel restrictions, the increased security at the ports and border crossings, the first sign of contagion had struck Paris one morning at the base of the Eiffel Tower, and again, moments later, at the Louvre. There was no telling how fast it would spread throughout Europe -- and that included the French countryside.

The King had been wrong. The disaster hadn't ended with his death, but it would end. Tristan hadn't been easy to take down, but of the two other ghouls -- the blonde and the brunette who could pass for human -- there had been no sign. 

In the end, it was Merlin who had destroyed Tristan. The zombies feared Arthur because he was a Reaper, and he could battle Tristan until the end of time, but it took magic to undo magic, and Merlin was Arthur's scythe.

There were still two more ghouls out there creating zombies. Two more ghouls to hunt down. Two more ghouls to kill, and the balance stood a chance of being restored.

At least, now, they knew where to look. Paris, France.

"I have bad memories of little taverns in the French countryside," Arthur said, pausing to kiss the corner of Merlin's jaw, in the soft just under his ear. "I met a bloke. Fell in love. Lost him for seventy years."

"That's funny," Merlin said after a long silence. "Same thing happened to me. It sucked."

"It did," Arthur said quietly. He rested his cheek on Merlin's temple and squeezed him gently.

"No French taverns, then?"

Arthur chuckled dryly. "Never again."

They stayed like that in silence for a few moments more before Merlin elbowed Arthur in the ribs. "We should get back to work."

The Zombie Apocalypse -- what Merlin called the Black Night -- had changed everything. Elena and Gwaine were running a militant, government-sponsored organization in conjunction with health officials and the military to contain and control the zombie population while Elyan searched for a cure he would never find. Lance and Gwen had survived, though not intact; while neither had been bitten, Lance's upper left pectoral muscle had been torn, requiring extensive surgery to repair. They had both fled the country the minute that the emigration restrictions had been eased.

And Will? Will was somewhere in the city, one of many who patrolled the boroughs at night, breaking curfew and ignoring the government's mandate to _contain_ the creatures, opting to destroy them instead. No one knew it except for Arthur, who had checked in on Will when Merlin hadn't heard from him in months, but Will was searching for Freya in the hopes that there would be a cure by the time he found her.

The sight of Will sitting on the curb, weeping into his hands after it turned out that _this_ zombie wasn't Freya -- it had made Arthur sad. He'd gone to Merlin's flat that night, crawled under the covers, and held Merlin until morning.

They'd lost Leon, Gwaine's old partner and a man that Arthur had never met. Percival, who'd insisted on meeting the man that Merlin was seeing, had enlisted -- and by enlisted, Arthur meant _blackmailed_ \-- Arthur on more than one occasion as a consultant after he'd been unable to track down Arthur's license to work as a private investigator.

Merlin had nearly died laughing. "See? I told you that you need to have a paper trail if you want to work among mortals. Listen to the voice of experience, for once."

Arthur had never dignified Merlin's needling. He still didn't understand the Internet, but at least he had learned how to use a mobile, though Merlin had taken away his shiny iPhone when Arthur spent too much time playing Angry Birds and not enough time saving him from zombies.

There was an explosion in the distance, but there had been so many over the last few weeks that neither of them so much as twitched. Luckily, this one didn't mar the sunrise.

"Arthur?" Merlin shifted in Arthur's arms; Arthur held him fast. "Back to work?" 

"Not yet."

Elena and Gwaine, Percival and Will. Arthur would never get over the shock that he had friends, now, just as he would never get over the thrill of having found Merlin. The longer he stayed in London, the more protective he felt of the city and its citizens. Of his friends. Of his love. But it was hard. It was so hard to love and lose every day.

It helped that there were stories of _Reaper_ sightings again. Merlin always shook his head whenever Arthur reached over to increase the volume on the telly whenever an ashen-faced near-victim was interviewed: "It was the freakiest thing I'd ever seen in my whole life, and that's counting my girlfriend trying to eat my face during the Black Night last year. Well, I guess she's my ex-girlfriend, now, but that's beside the point. This guy -- it was just a normal guy, _I swear to God_ \-- he turned into this ten-foot tall Grim Reaper, took out the zombies with a sword, and _vanished_ \--"

Merlin drummed his fingers on Arthur's knee impatiently. "You know, zombie hunting and accidentally dying because my backup _ran off_ aside, I still have a day job to go to."

Arthur rolled his eyes. "For the love of -- Merlin, I'm trying to watch the sunrise with my boyfriend. Will you _shut up_?"

Merlin laughed. "I knew it!"

"What part of _shut_ \--" Merlin silenced Arthur with a kiss.

**Author's Note:**

> If you'd rather comment on Livejournal (anon comments will be unscreened, I promise!), head on over to [THIS post](http://loaded-march.livejournal.com/56348.html).
> 
> Thank you for reading!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Fanfic Cover: "All the Dead Are Here"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/616379) by [La_Temperanza](https://archiveofourown.org/users/La_Temperanza/pseuds/La_Temperanza)




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